Kansas Medicaid Penalty Divisor: $207.70 a Day, and the Date on That Rate Is the Story

Updated August 27, 2026. Quick answer: Kansas publishes a DAILY divisor, and the newest one it publishes is $207.70 per day, effective July 1, 2018. That figure is not a guess: it is the last row of the “Average Daily Private Pay Rate Lookup Table” inside KDHE’s own Transfer of Property worksheet, which the agency still serves. Read the date twice — this is the newest rate Kansas publishes at a door that answers, not a rate this page can show is in force today.

What Kansas publishes

How the penalty period is calculated

• The instruction sheet states the arithmetic in the state’s own words: “APPLICABLE AVERAGE DAILY PRIVATE PAY RATE: The average statewide daily rate of Nursing Facilities on the first day of the penalty period will be displayed. This date is divided into the amount of the resource transferred to calculate the number of days of the penalty period.” The word “date” in that second sentence is the state’s own slip for “rate”; it is quoted here as written.
• Kansas counts the penalty in DAYS. Most states divide by a monthly figure and get months; Kansas divides by a daily figure and the worksheet returns a “Number of Penalty Days” with a start date and an end date. A remainder that would round away in a monthly state is simply another day here.
• The applicable rate is the one in effect on the FIRST DAY OF THE PENALTY PERIOD. That is a third possibility, distinct from both the transfer date and the application date, and it matters in a state whose rate changes every July 1.
• The penalty period does not begin at the transfer. The worksheet asks separately for the “initial start date for LTC payments” — the first day the person would otherwise have been eligible for long-term care assistance had there been no transfer penalty, including any request for prior medical, and no earlier than nursing facility entrance, HCBS eligibility or PACE enrollment.
• For multiple gifts, Kansas totals them and uses the earliest date: “For multiple transfers, use the earliest date of the transfers… For multiple transfers, enter the TOTAL amount of the resources that were transferred.”
• The published rate series has a genuine dip in it, which is worth knowing before you assume a figure only ever rises: the rate fell from $138.41 on July 1, 2009 to $136.14 on July 1, 2010 before resuming its climb.

Once you have the figure above, the Medicaid penalty period calculator does the arithmetic. This page is the Kansas rate record; the calculator is the class parent.

What this page does not settle

• The newest rate Kansas publishes is dated July 1, 2018, and this page will not pretend otherwise. The manual that carries it is frozen: its newest policy memo is #2017-05-02 and its newest medical assistance standards file is F-8 dated April 2017. KDHE’s own “current policy” pointer on that page goes to kancare.ks.gov, which returned HTTP 403 to every request made for this page. So $207.70 is the newest FIGURE PUBLISHED at a Kansas door that answers — it is not a claim about what the state applies in 2026.
• There is an inconsistency inside the state’s own workbook, and you should know about it if you rebuild an old penalty. For the rate effective July 1, 2013, the Applicant sheet and the workbook’s own printed label both read $169.68, while the Recipient sheet’s corresponding cell reads $169.43. The table above follows the two sources that agree.
• None of the historical rates above is the right divisor for a transfer being assessed today. They are published here because the series is what Kansas actually released, and because rebuilding an older penalty requires the rate that was in effect then — not because any of them is current.
• A worksheet is not a regulation. This page reports what KDHE’s eligibility-policy worksheet and its instruction sheet say. Kansas Medicaid eligibility policy also lives in statute, in the state plan and in agency policy memos, and where those differ from a worksheet they govern.
• Nothing here decides whether a transfer is penalised at all. The worksheet assumes that question is already answered and only computes the length of the penalty.

Eligibility is decided by the state agency on the whole file, not by this one number. Nothing here is legal advice, and no one should transfer, retitle or give away property on the strength of a worksheet.

Sources

• Kansas Department of Health and Environment, Transfer of Property (TOP) Worksheet, file dated July 1, 2018 — the workbook containing the Average Daily Private Pay Rate Lookup Table
• KDHE, Applicant — Transfer of Property Calculator Instructions
• KDHE Division of Health Care Finance, Eligibility Policy — Elderly & Disabled Medical, the index both documents are served from

Each source above was retrieved and read against the state text on August 27, 2026. Every figure on this page was checked against those bytes.