Kansas Crash Reporting Requirements
In Kansas, the crash reporting threshold is $1,000 in damage. Deadline to file: Immediately. Submit to: The nearest police authority.
- Damage threshold
- $1,000
Apparent property damage of $1,000 or more triggers the duty, and so does any injury or death regardless of the damage figure. The same $1,000 line separates a plain misdemeanor from a class A person misdemeanor if you leave the scene.
- Deadline to file
- Immediately
There is no filing window, because Kansas drivers do not file a written crash report. The duty is immediate and verbal: if no police officer is present, the driver — or any occupant 18 or older — must report the accident "by the quickest available means of communication". At the scene itself you must stop, give your name, address, registration number, your insurer's name and policy number, show your license on request, and render reasonable assistance to anyone hurt. The Division of Vehicles may demand a written report from a driver or owner afterwards if it needs one, and failing to report suspends your license until you do.
- Submit to
- The nearest police authority
Report to the nearest office of a duly authorized police authority — city police, the county sheriff or the highway patrol, whichever is closest. The officer who investigates then forwards a written report to the Kansas Department of Transportation within 10 days whenever the crash caused injury, death, or total property damage apparently reaching $1,000. Those officer reports are not confidential.
Kansas sets $1,000 — higher than 10 of the 44 jurisdictions on this site. The range runs from $250 to $4,000.
How Kansas compares with every other state
What this means after a crash
$1,000 is the number to keep in mind, and it is a damage figure rather than an injury one: a crash with no one hurt still has to be reported once the damage reaches it. Only 10 of the 44 that set a dollar figure start lower. Note what the threshold is measured against — apparent damage at the scene, not the final repair invoice — so the call has to be made before anyone has priced anything.
The deadline is not a number of days. Kansas wants the report immediately, which in practice means from the scene or as soon as you are able. A clock that starts and ends the same day leaves no room to "get to it later", and that is the most common way an ordinary crash turns into a charge of its own.
Who receives it matters as much as when. In Kansas the report goes to The nearest police authority. An officer writing a report at the scene is not automatically the report the state is waiting for — where the two are separate, the table above says who receives yours.
Every statute cited for Kansas
What changed
July 1, 2024
Leaving the scene of a fatal crash became a far heavier felony — Levi's law
HB 2665 (L. 2024, ch. 51) rewrote the penalty ladder in K.S.A. 8-1602 for a driver who does not stop and perform the duties K.S.A. 8-1602 through 8-1604 require. Where a driver who knew or reasonably should have known the accident caused injury or death and left anyway faced a severity level 5 person felony, that is now a severity level 4 person felony, and a new subsection makes it a severity level 3 person felony when more than one person died. The act names the amendments Levi's law. The act also closed a gap in the same ladder: damage of exactly $1,000 used to fall between "less than $1,000" and "in excess of $1,000" and so fit neither tier. It now reads "$1,000 or more".
2024 HB 2665, enrolled — an act relating to violations of the uniform act regulating traffic on highways
Why the rule looks like this
- What Changed in 2026Liability minimums doubled in Hawaii, two states dropped pure comparative fault, New Hampshire stopped inspecting cars, and three crash reporting thresholds moved — a dated account of the 2026 changes, and the ones already signed for 2027 and beyond.
- The Crash You Are Required to Report Is Smaller Than You ThinkCrash-report triggers start at $500 in Georgia and New Jersey and reach $3,000 for a Virginia police report; Florida's is $500 before 1 October 2026 and $2,000 from that date, and Pennsylvania and Maryland use no dollar figure at all.
More on Kansas
Checked against the primary sources above on September 27, 2026. If a figure here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it — what we have corrected so far is public.