Free tool · Wichita
What does a squatter cost you in Kansas?
Change the numbers to match your property. The rent is Kansas's own, from HUD; how long it drags on is your call; everything else is yours to overwrite.
Kansas estimate
$31,384
Your numbers.
These are national starting points, not claims about your property. The one figure that drives the total — how long it drags on — is yours to set. Nobody can source it, so we do not pretend to.
How long before you get it back?
6 months
Your assumption, not ours — courts do not publish how long this takes. A contested removal runs in months, not weeks, almost everywhere; how it goes in Kansas is in the guide.
How many bedrooms?
Sets the rent from HUD’s published Fair Market Rent for Wichita — $1,444/mo.
Mortgage / loan payment — per month
$
Only you know this one. The placeholder is roughly a $300k loan at current rates.
Lost rent or delayed sale — per month
$
HUD's Fair Market Rent for this metro, at the bedroom count you picked. It is the 40th percentile of recent-mover rents, so on a renovated or market-rate property it is a floor, not a valuation.
Attorney fees — one-off
$
No public data exists. Our estimate — nothing published backs it. No state bar and no court in any of these markets publishes fee data for an ejectment. Get a written quote and put it here.
Property taxes — per month
$
Your bill, divided by twelve. The placeholder is roughly a $250k property at Philadelphia's 1.3998% — Newark runs 1.845%, Los Angeles 1.187%.
Insurance — per month
$
No public data exists. Our estimate. Vacant cover genuinely does cost more, but the published figures for how much more disagree by a factor of five — anywhere from +25% to 5x. Use your own premium.
Utilities — per month
$
A national placeholder, unless your state overrides it below — Philadelphia's is the Water Department's own published bill. Whoever is inside, you are the ratepayer of record.
Damage and clean-out — one-off
$
No public data exists. Our estimate, and we want to be blunt: NO government body in the United States publishes squatter-damage data. Every figure you have seen quoted traces to one news story or to a lobby survey that counted houses, not dollars. We are not going to launder a number we cannot stand behind — put yours here.
If it happens in Kansas
$31,384
at 6 months— and every extra month adds $3,814.
Against a $0–$120k range, so the bar means something as you drag.
Carrying it, empty ($3,814/mo × 6 mo)
$22,884
One-off costs (attorney, damage)
$8,500
What ruins you is the carry — the months. On top of this you will pay to file, for the sheriff to serve and remove, and for a lawyer. Those are set locally and we do not print a number we cannot cite — but next to the months, they are a sliver.
Can you get any of it back? NO — you eat your own legal fees, and the only fee-shift the new act writes runs AGAINST you: use the affidavit route and get it wrong, and the person you put out can recover triple the fair market rent plus their attorney fees from you.. Quoted as printed in the enrolled bill, including 'An person'. This liability runs against 'the affiant owner' for a wrongful removal 'under this act' — it is the price of getting the affidavit route wrong, not a fee-recovery for the owner who is right. No fee-shift for a prevailing owner was found in either the act or the limited-actions eviction statutes.
Why Kansas costs what it does
Kansas gives you two ways out, and one is brand new. Since 2026 you can hand a notarized affidavit to a county law enforcement agency; once it verifies you own the place, an officer serves the person inside with notice to vacate immediately — no judge and no court in that route. If the affidavit route is not available, the ordinary path is an eviction lawsuit in the limited-actions court: a three-day notice, an appearance date set 3 to 14 days out, then a trial within 14 days of that. But read where the fast route stops — the act tells an officer to serve a notice and never says who physically removes a person who ignores it.
How you must remove them
summary_plus_affidavit
“The owner of a dwelling unit or the agent of the owner of a dwelling unit may request the removal of an unauthorized person from the dwelling unit by submitting a notarized affidavit to a law enforcement agency in the county where the dwelling unit is located”
Two routes. The 2026 affidavit route (HB 2378) sends a sworn affidavit to a county law enforcement agency and, once verified, an officer serves notice to vacate — no judge. The ordinary route is a limited-actions eviction lawsuit, which reaches squatters because K.S.A. 61-3801 governs any lawsuit 'to evict a person from possession of real property,' not only tenants.
The statute
Kansas HB 2378 (2026), the removal of squatters act; ordinary eviction under K.S.A. 61-3801 et seq.
“Occupancy by a squatter is excluded from the residential landlord tenant act and the removal of a squatter shall not require the use of an eviction action under such act.”
HB 2378 § 8 provides it takes effect on publication in the statute book; as of 2026-07-14 the enrolled text is quoted and the K.S.A. section numbers it is codified under should be checked once the statute book is out.
Rent, by bedroom
1 bed $849 · 2 bed $1,099 · 3 bed $1,444 · 4 bed $1,784
FY2026, effective 2025-10-01
All four figures appear verbatim on the cited page and were independently cross-confirmed against HUD's own FY2026 data (2BR $1,099 / 3BR $1,444). Affordable Housing Online republishes HUD's schedule rather than being HUD itself, hence secondary; the underlying figure is HUD's. An FMR is the 40th-percentile recent-mover rent — a floor for a renovated flip, not an estimate of its market rent.
Do you get your legal fees back?
NO — you eat your own legal fees, and the only fee-shift the new act writes runs AGAINST you: use the affidavit route and get it wrong, and the person you put out can recover triple the fair market rent plus their attorney fees from you.
“An person harmed by a wrongful removal under this act may have the possession of the dwelling unit restored and may recover actual costs and damages, as well as punitive damages of triple the fair market rent of the dwelling, plus court costs and reasonable attorney fees.”
Quoted as printed in the enrolled bill, including 'An person'. This liability runs against 'the affiant owner' for a wrongful removal 'under this act' — it is the price of getting the affidavit route wrong, not a fee-recovery for the owner who is right. No fee-shift for a prevailing owner was found in either the act or the limited-actions eviction statutes.
Is there a fast sheriff route?
YES — since 2026. A notarized affidavit to a county law enforcement agency; once the agency verifies you are the record owner, an officer serves the occupant with notice to vacate no sooner than 24 hours after receipt. No judge is named anywhere in the act.
“Upon verification and after at least 24 hours from receipt of the affidavit, a law enforcement officer shall serve a notice on the unauthorized person to vacate immediately the dwelling unit.”
The act stops at SERVICE OF A NOTICE — nothing in its eight sections says who removes a person who ignores it. And § 3(a) orders the agency to 'verify that the affiant is the record owner' while giving it no method, data source, or standard — the same unfunded verification gap Florida and Texas hand their sheriffs.
This is the bill for finding out too late.
Nothing on this page will get an occupant out, and be wary of anyone who says otherwise. What DeedProof does is earlier and duller: it verifies you own the property, structures the statement you swear before a notary, and files it — so that if someone does break in, the officer at the door has something to work from instead of a lease they cannot check.
The decision still belongs to the officer. Our job is to make it an easy one.
This page is the money. The law behind it is on Kansas’s guide — whether police can arrest, whether a sheriff can act on your affidavit alone, and how long occupation takes to become a claim. Every answer quoted from the statute.