How to Reinstate an LLC in Kansas: No Deadline, No Name Hold

Updated August 24, 2026. Quick answer: Kansas forfeits an LLC’s articles of organization when its business entity information report or $80 fee is more than 90 days overdue. Reports are due every other year, no later than April 15. Getting it back has no deadline: K.S.A. 17-76,146 does not set a time limit on filing a certificate of reinstatement, and the fee for back reports is capped at the 10 most recent years, so a company forfeited decades ago does not owe decades of report fees. What Kansas does not do is hold the company’s name. The reinstatement certificate itself has a line for a substitute name, because the statute assumes from the outset that the original one may already be gone. There is no grace period, short or long, that protects it in the meantime.

Forfeiture: a 90-day window, then no window at all

Kansas does not use the words “administrative dissolution.” It uses “forfeiture”, and the trigger is narrower than in neighboring states. There is no ground for missing a registered agent notice or letting a duration term lapse; the only path to forfeiture under this section is the biennial business entity information report.

Every Kansas LLC, and each series of a series LLC, files a business entity information report on a two-year cycle keyed to its formation year, listing the members who own at least 5% of the company’s capital and the location of its principal office.

“The report shall be filed not later than April 15.”

K.S.A. 17-76,139(b)

“At the time of filing the business entity information report, each limited liability company or series shall pay to the secretary of state a fee in an amount equal to $80, plus the amount specified in rules and regulations of the secretary.”

K.S.A. 17-76,139(f)

Miss the report or the fee by more than 90 days and the articles of organization are forfeited; the statute borrows this penalty structure directly from the corporation code by cross-reference. From that point, Kansas puts no clock on getting them back: K.S.A. 17-76,146 has no deadline language at all, unlike the five-year windows found in neighboring states, and there is nothing resembling a late-reinstatement surcharge for waiting.

That absence is worth taking seriously rather than assuming it is an oversight. Kansas read the same problem every RULLCA state solves with a five-year cutoff and simply chose not to impose one; the trade-off it made instead sits in the name rule below.

Kansas is not a RULLCA state at all: its LLC act is closer in structure to Delaware’s, built around articles of organization that get canceled or forfeited rather than a dissolution the entity continues to legally exist through. That underlying structure is part of why its reinstatement mechanics read so differently from Iowa’s or Nebraska’s: reinstatement here is a document that revives forfeited articles and validates everything done in the interim, rather than a determination the state reviews and can accept or reject on discretionary grounds.

No deadline, but also no name reservation

“(1) The name of the limited liability company at the time its articles of organization or authority to do business was canceled or forfeited and, if such name is not available at the time of reinstatement, the name under which the limited liability company is to be reinstated;”

K.S.A. 17-76,146(a)(1)

That clause is built into the reinstatement certificate itself. Kansas does not promise the name back at any point, forfeited-and-gone is treated as a normal possibility on day one, not just after some grace period expires. The Secretary of State’s own reinstatement form instructs filers to check name availability before filing, and if it’s taken, to submit a Written Consent to Use of Similar Business Name, a letter of advertising (foreign entities only), or simply file under a new name.

For a domestic LLC whose name has been taken by another Kansas business, the reinstatement form gives two options: get a Written Consent to Use of Similar Business Name from the business currently holding it, filed under K.S.A. 17-7918, or provide the current name, state that it is changing, and give the new name. Foreign LLCs get a third option, a letter of advertising confirming the business will identify itself as being based out of its home state in all its Kansas advertising, an option only available if the LLC is not domesticated in the same state as the name-holder.

None of these options are unusual filings on their own. What makes Kansas distinct is that the statute assumes, structurally, that one of them may be necessary. There is no separate provision anywhere in Chapter 17, Article 76 that reserves a forfeited LLC’s name for any length of time while the company decides whether to reinstate. A reader used to a grace period, of any length, should not import that assumption into Kansas.

What it costs: capped at 10 years of back reports

“Each of the information reports that have not been filed within the reporting period that would have been due, limited to the last 10 years of information reports, must be submitted with the reinstatement.”

Kansas SOS Form RL, Instructions

An LLC forfeited for a lapsed registered agent instead of a missed report skips the $85 penalty fee entirely. The report-fee line is where the 10-year cap actually earns its keep: without it, an LLC that let its filings lapse for twenty or thirty years would owe a report fee for every missed cycle. With the cap, five reports, ten years, is the most anyone owes, regardless of how long the company sat forfeited.

The base reinstatement fee itself is not stated as a dollar figure in the LLC act. K.S.A. 17-76,136(d) sets it by cross-reference to the fee “prescribed by K.S.A. 17-7506… for filing a certificate of reinstatement of a corporation’s articles of incorporation,” and that corporation statute in turn caps the amount “established pursuant to rules and regulations” at $150. The $35 figure used above is the amount the Secretary of State currently charges under that authority, confirmed on the official Certificate of Reinstatement form, not a number written into the statute itself.

Reinstatement erases the gap

“Upon the filing of a certificate of reinstatement of limited liability company, a limited liability company, each series thereof whose certificate of designation has been canceled as a result of the cancellation of the articles of organization of the limited liability company pursuant to K.S.A. 17-7926 (b), 17-7929 (b) or 17-7934 (c), and amendments thereto, and each series thereof that has not been terminated and wound up, shall be reinstated with the same force and effect as if the articles of organization or authority to do business of the limited liability company had not been canceled or forfeited pursuant to K.S.A. 17-76,139 (g), 17-7926 (b), 17-7929 (b) or 17-7934 (f), and amendments thereto.”

K.S.A. 17-76,146(c)

Contracts, property, and liability for acts taken during the forfeiture period are all treated as if the articles had never lapsed. The statute is explicit that this covers not just the company’s own dealings but everything done in its name by members, managers, employees, and agents while the articles sat forfeited, and it separately confirms that any real or personal property and other rights and interests the company held at forfeiture, or acquired afterward, come back vested in the company once reinstatement is filed.

For a series LLC, reinstatement of the master LLC’s articles also reinstates each series whose certificate of designation was canceled as a result, as long as that series had not already been terminated and wound up separately.

What you actually file

The Certificate of Reinstatement (form RL) requires:

• The business’s Kansas Secretary of State file number, found by searching the business name in the Secretary of State’s online lookup
• The LLC’s legal name, confirmed available or resolved with consent, a letter of advertising, or a new name
• The name and address of a resident agent in Kansas, an individual, the business itself, or another registered business
• A Kansas street address for the registered office (a P.O. box is not acceptable)
• Signature of an authorized person, filed under penalty of perjury

All past-due information reports and every fee must be submitted together in a single package. The Secretary of State’s office will not process documents received without full payment, and separate submissions are not accepted. Payment can be made by check, payable to the Kansas Secretary of State, or by credit or debit card using the form’s cover page. Once processed, a certified copy of the certificate of reinstatement is mailed back to the filer.

Because Kansas treats reinstatement as a document to be filed and paid for rather than an application the Secretary of State evaluates and can deny on the merits, there is no separate appeal-from-denial procedure built into the LLC reinstatement statute the way there is in Iowa and Nebraska. The filing either meets the requirements and is accepted, or it is returned as incomplete.

The same form covers limited liability companies, limited liability partnerships, and limited partnerships. The underlying statutory citations differ by entity type, but the paperwork and the fee structure are shared across all three, which is worth knowing if a reader is untangling a group of related entities that lapsed together.

What this page does not do

• It does not cover Series LLC certificates of designation reinstated separately. A series canceled under a different provision uses a related but distinct certificate.
• It does not address foreign LLCs whose authority to do business was revoked for reasons other than the information report.
• It does not confirm whether the $150 statutory cap on the reinstatement fee has changed since the last time the Secretary of State set the amount by rule. The $35 figure comes from the current official form, not a fixed number in the statute.
• It is not legal advice.

Related: LLC cost in Kansas, dissolve an LLC in Kansas, reinstate an LLC in Oklahoma, reinstate an LLC in Illinois, LLC annual report requirements by state.

Sources

Every statement of law on this page is quoted from the text below, as read on August 24, 2026. Each row links the document it was read from.

General consumer information, not financial, tax or legal advice. State rules are as published by the cited source on 2026-08-24 and change; your own facts govern, and a reinstatement question with money on it is one to put to a lawyer or accountant in that state.