The rest of what we have written about Kansas. Every figure is quoted from Kansas’s own statute or its courts’ own published schedule, and carries the date we last checked it.
Protective orders and restraining orders in Kansas
Who can ask for one, what you have to show, what a judge can order, what it costs, and what happens if it is broken — quoted from Kansas’s own statutes, not summarized.
See a different stateKansas
Kansas issues protection from abuse orders under article 31 of chapter 60 of the statutes. An ex parte order can be made without the other person present, and a longer order follows a hearing. Kansas runs a ladder of durations — one to two years, then an extension of one to three, and then, in defined circumstances, an order lasting for the lifetime of the defendant. The route to that last one is set out first below, because the grounds for it are things that have often already happened.
The short version8 points · tap one to jump to it
- The order after a hearing — Kansas builds a ladder. Each rung requires a motion and a hearing, and the top rung is unusual enough that most people never learn it exists.
- What the judge can actually order — It is not merely an order that he leave — it is an order directing law enforcement to remove him.
- If they break it — Kansas treats a breach as potentially several offenses at once rather than one.
- Does this cover me? — Kansas is narrower than most states on who qualifies, and it is worth checking yourself against the list before you file.
- If they break it — Violating an extended order is a felony.
- How long a Kansas order lasts — including the lifetime route
- Custody orders and your protection order: which one wins
- The part that is the same in every state — This is federal law and it does not change at a state line.
In this subject 8
The order after a hearing
The short version8 points · tap one to jump to it
- The order after a hearing — Kansas builds a ladder. Each rung requires a motion and a hearing, and the top rung is unusual enough that most people never learn it exists.
- What the judge can actually order — It is not merely an order that he leave — it is an order directing law enforcement to remove him.
- If they break it — Kansas treats a breach as potentially several offenses at once rather than one.
- Does this cover me? — Kansas is narrower than most states on who qualifies, and it is worth checking yourself against the list before you file.
- If they break it — Violating an extended order is a felony.
- How long a Kansas order lasts — including the lifetime route
- Custody orders and your protection order: which one wins
- The part that is the same in every state — This is federal law and it does not change at a state line.
In this subject 8
One to two years, then three, then life
Kansas builds a ladder. Each rung requires a motion and a hearing, and the top rung is unusual enough that most people never learn it exists.
Note the floor: not less than one year. A Kansas court cannot make a token order of a few weeks.
And then the provision that matters most:
On a verified motion and a hearing, a Kansas court may extend a protection order for the lifetime of the defendant where one of three things is true: the defendant has violated a valid protection order; has previously violated one; or has been convicted of a person felony against you or a member of your household.
Read those grounds carefully, because two of the three are things that have already happened to a great many people who do not know the provision exists. If the person subject to your order has broken it before — even an earlier order, even years ago — or has a person-felony conviction involving you or someone in your house, a lifetime order is on the table. It requires a verified motion, and it requires you to bring the proof.
This is the strongest single reason on this page to keep records. Old orders, old violation paperwork, old convictions — that history is what unlocks the top rung of the ladder.
What the judge can actually order
The statutory relief
Kansas relief is wide. The court may restrain the defendant from abusing or molesting you or your children; grant you possession of the residence to the exclusion of the defendant; require alternate housing; award temporary custody; order law enforcement to evict the defendant; order support payments for up to a year, extendable a further twelve months; award costs and attorney’s fees; provide for possession of personal property; require counseling; and make any other order deemed necessary to promote safety.
The eviction provision is worth naming out loud. It is not merely an order that he leave — it is an order directing law enforcement to remove him. If the problem is that an order on paper will not by itself get someone out of the house, that is the answer, and you have to ask for it.
If they break it
What a violation is
Kansas treats a breach as potentially several offenses at once rather than one. Violating an order excluding the defendant from the residence is both criminal trespass and violation of a protective order. Violating the restraint on abuse may be assault, battery, domestic battery and violation of a protective order.
That matters for two reasons. Charges can be brought on more than one basis from a single incident, and — as above — a violation is one of the three gateways to a lifetime order.
Does this cover me?
Three relationships — and the gap to know about
Kansas is narrower than most states on who qualifies, and it is worth checking yourself against the list before you file.
An intimate partner or household member means people who are or have been in a dating relationship; people who reside or have formerly resided together; and people who have had a child in common.
A dating relationship is "a social relationship of a romantic nature", judged on the nature of the relationship, how long it lasted, how often the two people interacted, and how long ago it ended.
Notice what is not on that list. Kansas’s Protection from Abuse Act does not extend to relatives as such — a sibling, a parent, an adult child — unless you live together or have lived together. If a relative is the problem and you have never shared a home, ask an advocate about the separate protection from stalking, sexual assault or human trafficking order under K.S.A. 60-31a05 and 60-31a06, which does not depend on any relationship at all.
What counts as abuse
Two things to take from that. Recklessly causing bodily injury counts — it does not have to have been deliberate. And the second limb covers placing someone in fear of imminent injury by physical threat, so nothing has to have landed.
The definition also covers sexual intercourse or lewd fondling with a person under sixteen done with intent to arouse sexual desires.
If they break it
A class A person misdemeanor — unless the order was extended
Kansas does something structurally unusual here, and it connects directly to the ladder of durations described above.
That is the ordinary position, and Kansas does not step it up for repeat violations of an ordinary order.
But:
Violating an extended order is a felony. Not on the second occasion, not after a conviction — the first time. So the extensions described earlier on this page do more than buy you time: they change what breaking the order costs the other person, from a misdemeanor to a severity level 6 person felony.
That is a strong practical reason to seek the extension when the first order approaches its end, even in a quiet period.
The offense covers a wide range of orders: protection from abuse orders under K.S.A. 60-3105, 60-3106 and 60-3107; orders from any other state or Indian tribe that are consistent with 18 U.S.C. s. 2265; certain restraining orders; no-contact conditions of pretrial release or of release after conviction or pending appeal; and protection from stalking, sexual assault or human trafficking orders under K.S.A. 60-31a05 and 60-31a06.
How long a Kansas order lasts — including the lifetime route
Kansas has one of the strongest extension provisions in the country, and hardly anyone knows it is there. If the respondent violates your order, the statute stops being permissive and becomes mandatory — and the ceiling comes off.
The ordinary term — K.S.A. 60-3107(e)
“a protective order or approved consent agreement shall remain in effect until modified or dismissed by the court and shall be for a fixed period of time not less than one year and not more than two years, except as provided in paragraphs (1) and (2).”
A floor as well as a ceiling: a Kansas order cannot be for less than a year.
Ordinary extension — one to three years
“Upon motion of the plaintiff, such period may be extended for an additional period of not less than one year and not more than three years.” No particular showing is specified for this route; it is on your motion.
The provision to know: extension up to the defendant’s lifetime
K.S.A. 60-3107(e)(2), in full:
“Upon verified motion of the plaintiff and after the defendant has been personally served with a copy of the motion and has had an opportunity to present evidence and cross-examine witnesses at a hearing on the motion, the court shall extend a protective order for not less than one additional year and may extend the protective order up to the lifetime of the defendant if the court determines by a preponderance of the evidence that the defendant has: (A) Violated a valid protection order; (B) previously violated a valid protection order; or (C) been convicted of a person felony … committed against the plaintiff or any member of the plaintiff’s household. No service fee shall be required for a motion filed pursuant to this subsection.”
Take this apart, because every clause is doing work:
- “Shall extend… for not less than one additional year.” If you prove one of (A), (B) or (C), extension is mandatory. The judge has no discretion to refuse.
- “May extend… up to the lifetime of the defendant.” The ceiling above that mandatory year is a lifetime order. Kansas needs no conviction, no five-year sentence, nothing of the kind Maryland requires.
- Preponderance of the evidence. The civil standard. A criminal prosecution for the violation is not required — and (B), “previously violated,” reaches back to violations of any valid protection order, not only this one.
- “No service fee shall be required.” Making the motion costs you nothing to serve.
What to do with this. Document every violation, however small, and report it. You are not only building a criminal case — you are building the civil proof that converts a two-year order into a mandatory extension, and potentially a lifetime one, on the lower standard.
Custody orders and your protection order: which one wins
The 2025 change — K.S.A. 60-3107(c)(4)
Kansas amended this in 2025 (L. 2025, ch. 76, effective 1 July 2025) to settle a conflict that used to cause real confusion:
“Any legal custody or parenting time order, or order relating to the best interests of a child, issued pursuant to the revised Kansas code for care of children or the revised Kansas juvenile justice code, shall be binding and shall take precedence over any such custody or parenting order involving the same child issued under the protection from abuse act, until jurisdiction … is terminated.”
The resulting hierarchy is worth holding in your head, because it is not intuitive:
Under subsection (c)(3), on sworn testimony showing good cause, a protection order may modify custody, residency and parenting time previously ordered in a divorce, separate maintenance, annulment or parentage action. And the statute defines good cause for you: “immediate and present danger of abuse to the plaintiff or minor children shall constitute good cause.”
That is what (c)(4) settles. Where the State is involved through a CINC or juvenile justice proceeding, that court’s custody orders govern until its jurisdiction ends.
There is a safeguard in (c)(4)(B): the inconsistent order must be “specific in its terms, reference any preexisting protection from abuse order and the custody being modified, and a copy of such order shall be filed in the preexisting protection from abuse case.” So the two files are meant to be kept in step. In practice, tell each court about the other.
Two shorter clocks inside your order
Not everything in a Kansas order runs for the full term. Support ordered under (a)(6) runs “for a fixed period of time not to exceed one year”, extendable by twelve months on your motion. And the restraint on canceling utilities under (a)(2) “shall expire 60 days following the date of issuance.” Sixty days. If the power and water are in their name, that is a short runway — use it to get the accounts moved.
The part that is the same in every state
An order from one state works in all of them
This is federal law and it does not change at a state line. An order issued by one state, tribe or territory must be enforced by every other as if that state had issued it. And you do not have to register it in the new state first — registration is optional, not a precondition to enforcement.
The same section also says the enforcing state must not tell the restrained person that the order has been registered there unless the protected person asks it to, and must not publish anything online that would be likely to reveal the protected person’s identity or location.
The federal firearms rule needs a hearing first
This is the single most misunderstood point in the whole subject, and it cuts against what most people assume. The federal prohibition at 18 U.S.C. s. 922(g)(8) reaches a person subject to an order only where three things are true: the order was made after a hearing of which they had actual notice and at which they had a chance to take part; it restrains them in relation to an intimate partner or that partner’s child; and it either carries a credible-threat finding or expressly forbids the use of force.
So an emergency or ex parte order does not trigger the federal prohibition on its own — there has been no hearing yet. State law may go further, and many states do, which is why the state rule is set out on this page separately. In United States v. Rahimi (2024) the Supreme Court upheld s. 922(g)(8), holding that “[a]n individual found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment.”
This rule is narrower than it looks, and the detail matters. Who counts as an “intimate partner” is a defined term that excludes dating partners you never lived with; the two halves of the third condition are not equally settled after Rahimi; and there is a separate federal route based on convictions rather than orders, which does reach dating partners. We set all of it out, quoted from the United States Code, on one page: Guns and protection orders — the federal rule.
How does this state compare? Ten states do nothing at all about firearms on a protection order; fourteen prohibit possession but give the court no way to collect them. All fifty side by side: which states actually take the guns.
You should not be charged for this — in any state
This is settled, and it is worth knowing before you walk into a courthouse. Under 34 U.S.C. s. 10450, a state applying for STOP grant funding must certify to the Attorney General that its "laws, policies, and practices do not require" a victim to bear the costs associated with the filing, issuance, registration, modification, enforcement, dismissal, withdrawal or service of a protection order or a petition for one — nor the costs of filing criminal charges, or of warrants and witness subpoenas. A jurisdiction that does charge has its funds withheld and redistributed to the states that do not.
Every state receives STOP funding and every state has certified compliance. The practical consequence, in the words of the National Center on Protection Orders and Full Faith & Credit, is that victims "should not be required to pay such costs in any state". That covers having the papers served on the other person, which is the charge people are most often asked for.
Two honest qualifications. The provision does not stop a court charging the respondent — many states order costs against them, and that is permitted. And it is a funding condition rather than a direct federal ban, so what a clerk does on a given day can still be wrong. If you are asked to pay a fee for any of the things listed above, you can say that your state has certified under 34 U.S.C. s. 10450 that it does not charge for them. Advocates can also raise it with the National Center on Protection Orders and Full Faith & Credit on 1-800-903-0111, prompt 2.
Where this state’s own statute says so expressly, that is quoted above.
Authority: K.S.A. ch. 60, art. 31, the Protection from Abuse Act. Definitions at s. 60-3102. Orders, relief, duration, extension and violations at s. 60-3107. The criminal offense of violating a protective order at K.S.A. s. 21-5924. Protection from stalking, sexual assault or human trafficking orders at K.S.A. ss. 60-31a05 and 60-31a06. — read it on the Kansas Revisor’s site. Checked 15 Sep 2026.
How we checked this page
Every quotation above was read in the source named in the Authority line, not taken from a summary or another website. Where a source would not open, we say so at the point we relied on something else.
On this date we also re-checked every section cited above for repeal, renumbering or amendment since 2024. That sweep is not decorative: it is what caught North Dakota’s protection order chapter being repealed and replaced, Nebraska’s moving to an entirely new title, and a dozen 2025 and 2026 amendments that most published guidance has not yet picked up.
Nothing is outstanding on the main questions for Kansas. What we cannot promise is that nothing has changed since this date. Quote the words with confidence; check a section number before you put it in a filing. And if anything here does not match what a clerk or judge tells you, the court is right and we are wrong — tell us and we will fix it.
We keep a public record of every time we have got the law wrong on these pages, what caused it, and how long it was live: where we were wrong.
If there are children
What Kansas presumes about custody, and the emergency jurisdiction that exists when someone has to leave the state.