How does a Kansas landlord lawfully end a tenancy, and when may a tenant leave early?

Every figure on this page is a Residential Landlord and Tenant Act figure and applies to a dwelling unit as that Act defines it. A tenancy the Act does not reach falls back to the older general landlord-and-tenant law in the same article of the statutes, and the answers there are different: the notice is one month, or the length of the rent interval where rent is reserved at intervals shorter than a month, and only ten days where an employer provides the housing to an employee; the general law has its own service statute, and it says no notice to quit is needed where the contract states the time for termination. The Act does not reach occupancy incidental to detention or to medical, geriatric, educational, counseling or religious service; occupancy under a contract of sale; a fraternal or social organization's quarters; transient occupancy in a hotel, motel or rooming house; occupancy conditioned on employment; a condominium or cooperative owner's own unit; or premises used primarily for agriculture, unless the arrangement was created to avoid the Act. It also does not reach a rental agreement that was valid before the Act took effect, though it does reach any renewal, extension or modification of one, or a person who entered and remained without a rental agreement and without the landlord's knowledge. Land accommodating a manufactured or mobile home is outside the definition of a dwelling unit unless the home itself is rented from the same landlord, and lot tenancies are covered on the manufactured-home-park page.

The switch is the statutory exclusion list rather than a place or a date, so a reader finds out which side of it a tenancy is on by asking what kind of accommodation it is and how it was created. Ordinary residential renting is inside the Act. The excluded arrangements listed above are outside it and are governed by the older general law, which has its own notice periods, its own service rules, and no domestic-violence, abandonment or holdover-damages machinery of the Act's kind. One provision does reach both regimes and the manufactured-home act as well: the housing-protection section for people affected by domestic violence, sexual assault, human trafficking or stalking.

The switch changes: every answer on this page.

Landlord: 30 days. Tenant: 30 days.

The month-to-month rule stacks two anchors at once and both have to be satisfied, which is the Kansas trap. The notice must state that the tenancy will end on a periodic rent-paying date, and that date must be not less than 30 days after the other party receives the notice. So a notice received on the 5th cannot end the tenancy on the 1st of the following month, and a notice naming a rent-paying date fewer than 30 days after receipt is short and does not work. The clock also starts on receipt rather than on sending, which puts the risk of a slow or failed delivery on whoever gives the notice, and Kansas prescribes no delivery method to fall back on. The week-to-week rule is simpler and uses a different anchor: written notice at least seven days before the termination date the notice names, which may be any day.

Whether the termination date must fall on a rental-period boundary or a rent-due date differs between tenancy types or is not settled by the statute; the rule for each is stated above.

Tiers: Three periods. A month-to-month tenancy takes 30 days, counted to a periodic rent-paying date at least that far after receipt. A week-to-week tenancy takes seven days, counted to the termination date the notice names. And a tenant who is in the military service of the United States, where the termination is necessitated by military orders, need give no more than 15 days' written notice to end a month-to-month tenancy; that shorter period runs in the tenant's favor only and does nothing for the landlord. Nothing keys a period to how long the tenant has lived there, the building type, the size of the landlord's holdings, a subsidy, or the county.

A lease may not change the period. The Act carries a bilateral anti-waiver clause: no rental agreement may provide that the tenant or the landlord agrees to waive or forego rights or remedies under the Act, and a provision that does so is unenforceable. It runs both ways, so a lease may not shorten the landlord's 30 days any more than the tenant's. A landlord who deliberately uses a rental agreement containing a provision known to be prohibited owes the tenant the actual damages the tenant sustained.

A statute requires the landlord's and tenant's periods to be equal, or bars a lease from imposing a longer period on one side.

Source of the period: a termination-notice statute states it.

Either the landlord or the tenant may end a month-to-month tenancy by written notice stating that the tenancy will end on a periodic rent-paying date not less than 30 days after the other party receives the notice, and a week-to-week tenancy by written notice given at least seven days before the termination date the notice names. The same periods bind both sides. A tenant in the military service of the United States whose termination is necessitated by military orders need give no more than 15 days' notice. The statute closes the obvious dodge as well: a rental agreement for a definite term of more than 30 days is not a month-to-month tenancy even though the rent is reserved payable at intervals of 30 days, so a landlord cannot convert a fixed term into a terminable one by describing the rent that way. The no-cause route stands on its own and is not limited by the Act's for-cause termination section, which the Act says in terms. Nothing in the statute prescribes how the notice must be delivered, so the party giving it carries the risk of proving receipt.

No: no statewide rule requires a reason, and no statute expressly authorizes local ordinances.

Local ordinances: no statute or decision addresses them. No Kansas statute addresses local just-cause or eviction-control ordinances one way or the other, and Kansas cities hold constitutional home rule, so the field is open unless the legislature occupies it. The legislature has occupied only the rent-amount field: no political subdivision, including a county, municipality or township, may enact, maintain or enforce an ordinance or resolution that would have the effect of controlling the amount of rent charged, or the purchase price agreed, for privately owned residential or commercial property. That bar carves out property the subdivision itself owns and voluntary agreements for grants or incentives, and a 2016 amendment added that rent control may not be made a condition of a permit, plat, zoning change or conditional-use permit. It says nothing about grounds for ending a tenancy. The rent-regulation posture is carried on the rent-increase page.

No reason is required to end a periodic tenancy or to decline to renew one in Kansas. The residential Act states the notice periods and stops there, and it says expressly that its for-cause termination section does not limit either party's right to end the tenancy under the no-cause notice section, so the two routes are independent. The older general landlord-and-tenant law is the same: it states notice periods and no grounds. The Act's only bar of that kind is the housing-protection section, which stops a landlord evicting a tenant, or finding a lease violation, on the basis of or as a direct result of the tenant being a person affected by domestic violence, sexual assault, human trafficking or stalking. Protection against a retaliatory termination is covered on the habitability page.

The term ends on its date; no statute requires notice from either side.

After the term, a statute supplies what a holdover becomes. If the landlord consents to the tenant staying on, the Act's default-term rule takes over: unless the rental agreement fixes a definite term, the tenancy is week-to-week for a roomer who pays weekly rent and month-to-month in every other case. The trigger is the landlord's consent rather than the acceptance of rent as such. A common mistake is to think a tenant who holds over after a one-year lease becomes a year-to-year tenant entitled to notice before the year ends, because the older general law says so for tenancies it governs. The Kansas Court of Appeals has held otherwise for a dwelling: the general law's year-to-year sections are not part of the more specific residential Act, the Act was enacted later, and the consented holdover becomes month-to-month, ending on 30 days' notice.

A Kansas lease with a stated end date ends on that date and needs no notice to quit; the residential Act says nothing about the expiry of a fixed term, and the older general law states the rule expressly, that where the time for the termination of a tenancy is specified in the contract no notice to quit is necessary. Neither body requires a landlord or a tenant to give notice of non-renewal, and Kansas has no statute requiring a reminder before an automatic-renewal clause takes effect, either in the landlord-tenant article or in the consumer-protection statutes. If the tenant stays on and the landlord consents, the tenancy becomes month-to-month, or week-to-week for a weekly roomer, and is then terminable on the ordinary notice.

A tenant who stays after the term expires or after the tenancy is terminated, without the landlord's consent, gets no new tenancy: the landlord may bring an action for possession, which the Act routes to the code of civil procedure for limited actions. If the landlord consents to the continued occupancy, the statutory conversion applies instead and the tenant holds month-to-month, or week-to-week as a weekly roomer. A 2026 act on removing squatters does not change this: it defines a squatter to exclude a tenant who holds over in a periodic tenancy, so the holdover tenant keeps the Act's process.

Damages: An enhanced measure that attaches only to a wilful or bad-faith holdover. Qualifiers: the multiple is a maximum, not the award; and the award is the greater of two measures.

Kansas has no double or treble rent. Where the tenant stays without consent the landlord may bring an action for possession, and in addition, only if the holdover is wilful and not in good faith, may recover an amount not more than one and a half months' periodic rent or not more than one and a half times the actual damages the landlord sustained, whichever is greater. Three things about that measure matter. It is a ceiling the court may award up to, not a fixed sum. It is a greater-of formula, so actual damages can carry it above the rent figure. And the wilfulness gate is demanding: the Kansas Court of Appeals holds that wilful conduct in a civil action means an act performed with a designed purpose or intent to do wrong or cause injury, so the landlord must establish more than an intentional stay, and the court affirmed a refusal of holdover damages where the tenants had given their own 30 days' notice and the landlord had not addressed repairs materially affecting their safety. Good faith is separately defined in the Act as honesty in fact in the conduct of the transaction concerned.

Yes: a statute imposes the duty.

When it attaches: The duty attaches on abandonment and not before. Kansas is one of the states whose residential Act leaves out the uniform act's general clause putting a duty to mitigate on any aggrieved party, so there is no chapter-wide duty to fall back on; the statutory duty appears only in the abandonment section. The common-law rule points the same way and adds a second element: a landlord's duty to make a reasonable effort to find a new tenant begins when the tenant abandons the property and notifies the landlord of the abandonment. The Act then fixes the termination date, at the day a new tenancy begins where the landlord re-lets early, or at the day the landlord had notice of the abandonment where the landlord fails to make reasonable efforts or accepts the abandonment as a surrender.

Burden of proof: on the tenant.

The standard: The statute asks for reasonable efforts to rent the unit at a fair rental and says no more. The courts supply the rest: whether a party mitigated reasonably is a case-by-case examination of the totality of the circumstances, and the duty is bounded by common sense and reasonableness. The burden sits on the tenant, because Kansas treats mitigation as an affirmative defense and the burden of proving a failure to mitigate falls on the party who asserts it; that rule comes from the state's general civil-damages line rather than from a lease case, and the lease decisions applying it arose from commercial tenancies.

No authority addresses a clause accelerating the remaining rent.

The lease may not waive the duty.

If the tenant abandons the dwelling unit, the landlord must make reasonable efforts to rent it at a fair rental. Re-letting for a term beginning before the original agreement would have ended terminates that agreement on the day the new tenancy begins; and where the landlord fails to make reasonable efforts, or accepts the abandonment as a surrender, the agreement is treated as terminated by the landlord on the day the landlord had notice of the abandonment. The duty cannot be waived by the lease, because the Act's anti-waiver clause makes any provision giving up a right or remedy under it unenforceable. What Kansas does not have is a general duty: the residential Act leaves out the uniform clause imposing a duty to mitigate on any aggrieved party, so outside abandonment the tenant relies on the common law, which is itself keyed to abandonment plus notice of it. The burden of showing a failure to mitigate is the tenant's, as an affirmative defense. No Kansas statute bars a clause accelerating the remaining rent on default and no decision limits one; the general power to refuse enforcement of an unconscionable lease term is the only check. No Kansas appellate decision applies the mitigation duty to a dwelling: the lease decisions in this line all arose from commercial tenancies, and for a residence the duty comes straight from the statute.

A statute caps what an early-termination fee may be.

The cap: Kansas caps one early-termination fee and only one. Where a person affected by domestic violence, sexual assault, human trafficking or stalking asks to end a rental or lease agreement before its expiration date under the housing-protection section, the landlord may impose a reasonable termination fee not exceeding one month's rent, and may do so only if the lease already provides for such a fee. No cap applies to an ordinary early departure, so a lease-break charge on a lease that is not being ended under that section is unlimited by statute. Whether the one-month cap also displaces a larger liquidated-damages clause written into the lease has not been decided: the section makes its rights non-waivable and releases a protected person from rent for the period after vacating, which points that way, but no Kansas court has said so.

Outside the domestic-violence route there is no Kansas statute on early-termination fees, lease-break charges, buy-out clauses, re-letting fees or liquidated damages, so a lease may set its own charge. What limits it is a set of backstops. The Act's anti-waiver clause voids any term by which either party gives up a right or remedy under it, along with confession-of-judgment terms, one-sided attorney-fee terms and exculpation or indemnity terms, with a single carve-out permitting a lease to limit the landlord's liability for fire, theft or breakage in common areas; a landlord who deliberately uses a prohibited term owes actual damages. A court may find a rental agreement or a term of it unconscionable and refuse to enforce it, enforce the rest without the offending term, or limit its application. And the duty to mitigate after an abandonment reduces what a landlord may recover for the remainder of the term. The holdover ceiling of one and a half months' rent is a remedy cap, not an early-termination cap, and should not be read as one. This answer rests on the statutes rather than on the state's administrative regulations; the Act delegates rulemaking to no agency and Kansas has no rental-housing regulator with rate or fee authority.

Early-exit rights by ground: domestic violence and related grounds, a defense to rent rather than a right to leave; military service beyond the federal act, a deployment or transfer threshold below the federal act's; death of the tenant, no statute; and other statutory grounds.

Domestic violence and related grounds: no right to quit, but victim status is a defense or release when the landlord sues for rent.

Who qualifies: A protected person, meaning someone who during the preceding 12 months has been, is, or is in imminent danger of becoming a victim of domestic violence, sexual assault, human trafficking or stalking. Kansas is one of the states covering all four grounds, and the imminent-danger limb means a tenant need not show that an incident has already happened. Each ground takes its meaning from the state's crime-victim definitions: domestic violence covers abuse committed against the person, a spouse or a dependent child by a current or former spouse, a co-parent, a current or former cohabitant, someone related by blood or marriage, or someone in a dating or engagement relationship, and abuse there reaches causing or attempting physical harm, placing another in fear of imminent physical harm, coerced sexual relations, mental abuse including threats and acts designed to induce terror, depriving another of necessary health care, housing or food, and unreasonable forcible restraint. The section applies to tenancies under the residential Act and to manufactured-home lot tenancies alike.

Documentation: The tenant gives the landlord a statement about the domestic violence, sexual assault, human trafficking or stalking. If the landlord asks for documentation, only two forms count, and either one on its own is enough. The first is a document signed by the victim and by a person licensed by the state to practice medicine and surgery, a physician assistant, a person licensed by the board of nursing, or a person licensed by the behavioral sciences regulatory board, declaring under penalty of perjury that in that person's professional judgment, within their scope of practice, the incident occurred. The second is a court order granting the protected person relief. A police report is not on the list and does not satisfy the request. Submitting false information may itself be a basis for denying tenancy, for eviction, or for a lease violation.

Window: 365 days; the incident or documentation must fall within that window before the notice. The 12 months is built into who counts as a protected person rather than into any deadline for acting: the person must have been, be, or be in imminent danger of becoming a victim during the preceding 12 months. It is therefore a status window looking back from the moment protection is claimed, not a limit on how soon after an incident the tenant must move or give notice. In a rent action the court judges that status as it stood on the date the tenant vacated.

Notice: The statute states no notice period at all, in either direction. The tenant's only stated obligation is to notify the landlord, and to supply one of the two accepted documents if the landlord asks. Nothing says how far ahead the notice must come, whether it must come before the tenant leaves, or what the notice must contain, and no Kansas court has construed the section in the seven years since it was enacted. Any source quoting a number of days for this right is supplying one the statute does not.

Rent owed: A protected person who notifies the landlord is not liable for rent for the period after vacating the premises. If the landlord sues for that rent anyway, the tenant has an affirmative defense and is not liable, where the court finds on the balance of probabilities that the tenant was a protected person on the date of vacating and that the landlord was notified. Everything owed before the tenant vacates is untouched: late or unpaid rent and other amounts for that earlier period remain due.

Cost to the tenant: The landlord may impose a reasonable termination fee of no more than one month's rent on a protected person who asks to end the agreement before its expiration date, and may do so only if the lease already provides for such a fee. There is no other charge the section authorizes, and the section's rights cannot be waived by either side. A court may award $1,000 in statutory damages against a landlord who violates the section, plus reasonable attorney fees and costs.

Other tenants on the lease: the lease continues for the other tenants. The statute says that despite a protected person's termination, the rental or lease agreement continues for any remaining tenants. There is no rescreening, no new agreement, no ability-to-pay condition, and no power for the landlord to remove the person responsible for the violence.

Locks: Lock changes are not addressed.

Later screening: a landlord may not deny, refuse to renew, or terminate because of victim status or a past victim-status termination. Two bars, and the first reaches applicants rather than only sitting tenants. An applicant may not be denied tenancy on the basis of, or as a direct result of, the fact that the applicant is a protected person, provided the applicant otherwise qualifies for the tenancy or occupancy. And a tenant may not be evicted, or found to have violated the lease, on the same basis. What Kansas bars is the adverse decision itself. It says nothing about how a landlord or a screening service may describe or report a termination afterwards, and nothing about credit reporting by third parties, so a tenant looking for protection against the record of the departure will not find it here.

The landlord's side: The landlord may ask for documentation and may insist that it take one of the two accepted forms. Submission of false information by an applicant or a tenant under the section may be a basis for denying tenancy, for eviction, or for a lease violation. And where the lease provides for one, the landlord may charge a reasonable termination fee of up to one month's rent on an early termination under the section. The landlord gets nothing else: no right to refuse, no right to terminate the tenancy of the person responsible for the violence, and no protection for acting in good faith on a claim that turns out to be wrong. The section's rights cannot be waived, and a landlord may not require a tenant to waive them in a lease.

Kansas protects a tenant affected by domestic violence, sexual assault, human trafficking or stalking through a rent release and a defense rather than through a clean right to quit, and the difference matters. A protected person who notifies the landlord is not liable for rent for the period after vacating, and if the landlord sues for that rent the tenant has an affirmative defense, made out on the balance of probabilities by showing protected status on the date of vacating and that the landlord was notified. Two other subsections of the same section assume a protected person may end the agreement, because they speak of a termination under the section and of what happens to the remaining tenants afterwards. What the section never supplies is a procedure: no notice period, no form of notice, no duty on the landlord to release the tenant, and no rule about the deposit. No Kansas appellate decision has construed it in the seven years since it was enacted, so the safest reading is the text itself and not an inferred process. The practical shape is this. The tenant is a protected person if, in the preceding 12 months, the tenant has been, is, or is in imminent danger of becoming a victim of one of the four grounds. The tenant notifies the landlord, and on request supplies either a document signed by the tenant and a licensed medical, nursing or behavioral-sciences professional declaring under penalty of perjury that the incident occurred, or a court order granting relief; a police report will not do. Rent stops on vacating, arrears survive, and the lease continues for anyone else on it. The landlord may charge a reasonable termination fee of up to one month's rent if the lease provides for one. An applicant may not be denied tenancy, and a tenant may not be evicted or found in breach, because of protected status. The section has no confidentiality duty and no lock-change right, and Kansas landlord-tenant law contains no lock-change provision anywhere. Rights under the section cannot be waived, and a court may award $1,000 in statutory damages, plus fees and costs, for a violation.

Military service: A deployment or transfer threshold below the federal act's.

When the state rights attach: The right belongs to a tenant in the military service of the United States whose termination is necessitated by military orders, and the statute defines neither phrase and asks for no documentation. It runs one way only, from tenant to landlord, and it attaches to a month-to-month tenancy, which is the subject of the subsection it sits in. It gives nothing to a spouse or dependent in their own name and adds nothing for state active duty.

Kansas's whole state addition for servicemembers is a shortened notice period: a tenant in the military service of the United States, where ending the tenancy is necessitated by military orders, need give no more than 15 days' written notice to end a month-to-month tenancy instead of the ordinary 30. The same sentence appears in the older general landlord-and-tenant law for the tenancies that law governs. It is a shorter threshold than the federal servicemember act asks for, because the federal right turns on entry into service or on orders for a permanent change of station or a deployment of at least 90 days, while Kansas asks only that the termination be necessitated by orders. Beyond that Kansas adds nothing: there is no Kansas servicemembers civil relief act, and the state's military chapter, read article by article, contains no lease provision at all, so everything else a servicemember needs comes from the federal act.

Death of the tenant: No statute gives a right to end the lease on the tenant's death.

Other grounds: Two further grounds let a Kansas tenant end the agreement, and the first carries a deadline that is easy to miss. Where fire or casualty damages the dwelling unit so that its use and habitability are substantially impaired, the tenant may vacate the premises immediately and must then notify the landlord in writing within five days of doing so of the intention to end the agreement, in which case the agreement ends as of the date of vacating; where continued occupancy is lawful the tenant may instead vacate only the unusable part and pay rent reduced in proportion to the drop in fair rental value. On termination the landlord returns the recoverable part of the deposit and accounts for rent as of the date of vacating. Five days is half the period most states allow, and missing it costs the ground. Second, where the landlord makes an unlawful entry, makes a lawful entry in an unreasonable manner, or makes repeated demands for entry that are otherwise lawful but have the effect of unreasonably harassing the tenant, the tenant may seek an injunction to stop the conduct or may end the agreement, and may recover actual damages either way. The same section gives the landlord the mirror right where the tenant refuses lawful access, which is a for-cause route covered on the eviction page. Ending the agreement because the landlord will not repair, and the remedies for an unlawful removal or a cut in services, are covered on the habitability page. Kansas has no care-facility, age or disability, job-transfer, or general crime-victim termination ground.

Rent default plus stated conduct, such as removing belongings. The default period is 10 days.

Answering the presumption or notice: The presumption never arises if the tenant says otherwise: the landlord may assume abandonment only unless the tenant has notified the landlord to the contrary. There is no deadline on that notification and no prescribed form, so a tenant who tells the landlord the unit is not abandoned defeats the assumption whenever the tenant does so. There is no notice from the landlord for the tenant to answer, because the landlord serves none.

Kansas has a real abandonment presumption and it is a two-element test, not an absence count. After the tenant is 10 days in default for nonpayment of rent and has removed a substantial portion of the tenant's belongings from the dwelling unit, the landlord may assume the tenant has abandoned it, unless the tenant has notified the landlord to the contrary. Both elements are needed: an empty-looking unit with the rent paid is not abandonment, and a rent default with the tenant's belongings still in place is not either. The 30-day figure often quoted for Kansas is not this test at all: it is the separate rule letting a landlord enter the unit at reasonable times during any absence of the tenant longer than 30 days. Once abandonment may be assumed, the landlord must make reasonable efforts to re-rent at a fair rental, and the agreement is treated as ending on the day the new tenancy begins if the landlord re-lets early, or on the day the landlord had notice of the abandonment if the landlord fails to try or accepts the abandonment as a surrender. Abandonment and surrender are the only two situations in which the landlord may take possession without going to court. A lease may, but need not, require the tenant to give notice of an anticipated absence longer than seven days by the first day of it, and where a lease does require that, a tenant who wilfully fails to give it owes the landlord actual damages. What may be done with property left behind is covered separately from this page.

Kansas prescribes no way of delivering a termination notice, and the silence is the statute's own. The statute asks only for a written notice given to the other party, and for a month-to-month tenancy it runs the 30 days from the other party's receipt, so whoever gives the notice carries the risk of proving it arrived, with no safe harbor to fall back on. Two nearby service rules are regularly quoted for this notice and neither reaches it. The Act's own service rule, which allows service on the tenant or on a person over 12 residing on the premises or by posting in a conspicuous place, and adds two days when the notice is mailed, governs the three-day notice for unpaid rent only; that is on the eviction page. The older general landlord-and-tenant law has a full service statute, allowing service on the tenant, leaving a copy at the tenant's usual residence, delivery to a person over 12 residing on the premises, posting conspicuously if nobody is found there, or registered or certified mail with return receipt requested, with proof by affidavit or return receipt; but by its terms it serves the general law's own notices. It is the applicable rule for a tenancy the residential Act does not reach, and a sensible model for one it does, but it is not the required method.

Electronic delivery: the termination statute is silent on it.

What the notice must contain: The notice must be in writing and must state the date the tenancy ends, and for a month-to-month tenancy that date must be a periodic rent-paying date at least 30 days after receipt. No form, no statement of grounds, and no advisory language are required. Kansas does have one real content rule and it runs against the landlord, on the tenant's own notice. If a landlord gives a tenant a document that, once signed, would serve as the tenant's written notice of an intention to vacate, and that document contains any additional terms not in the rental agreement, it must carry a statutory warning in no smaller than ten-point boldface type telling the tenant that signing may bind them to terms not in the original lease and that they may decline to sign and give written notice in another form. If the warning is missing, the tenant's signature does not bind the tenant to the added terms.

The residential Act references no federal statute. The only federal touch anywhere in this topic is the phrase military service of the United States in the shortened 15-day tenant notice, which appears in both the residential Act and the older general law and which routes everything beyond that shortening to the federal servicemember act. Kansas has no state servicemembers civil relief act of its own.

The federal CARES Act 30-day notice to vacate for covered properties, as read in this state's courts: no state appellate decision construes it. No Kansas appellate decision construes the CARES Act's 30-day notice for covered dwellings. Nothing in Kansas law shortens or displaces the federal notice, so a landlord of a covered dwelling in Kansas faces the unsettled national picture with no state guidance. The gap is wide in practice: the state's own pre-suit notice for unpaid rent is three days. (Appellate picture read as of September 3, 2026.)

Schartz v. Foster, 15 Kan. App. 2d 213, 805 P.2d 505 (1991) (Kansas Court of Appeals; residential lease; bears on the end of a fixed term): A residential tenant whose one-year lease expired and who stayed on with the landlord's consent became a month-to-month tenant under the Residential Landlord and Tenant Act, terminable on 30 days' written notice, and not a year-to-year tenant entitled to notice before the end of the year. The general landlord-and-tenant sections on year-to-year tenancies govern landlord-tenant relationships generally and are not part of the more specific residential Act; where a general statute and a specific one conflict the specific one controls, and where two statutes cannot be harmonized the later legislative expression controls.

Heckard v. Martin, 25 Kan. App. 2d 162, 958 P.2d 665 (1998) (Kansas Court of Appeals; residential lease; bears on holding over): For the holdover damages the Residential Landlord and Tenant Act allows where a holdover is wilful and not in good faith, wilful conduct carries its standard civil meaning of an act performed with a designed purpose or intent to do wrong or to cause injury to another. A landlord must therefore establish more than an intentional act by the tenants; the act must be done with the intent to injure or to do wrong. The court affirmed the denial of holdover damages where the tenants had given their own 30 days' notice and the landlord had not addressed repairs materially affecting their safety.

Wichita Properties v. Lanterman, 6 Kan. App. 2d 656, 633 P.2d 1154 (1981) (Kansas Court of Appeals; arose from a commercial lease; bears on the duty to re-let): Where a tenant under a contract to pay rent abandons the property and notifies the landlord of the abandonment, the landlord must make a reasonable effort to secure a new tenant and obtain rent before recovering from the old tenant under the contract, so as to lessen the injury. The court added that the duty to mitigate does not begin until the tenant abandons the property and notifies the landlord of it, so the trigger is abandonment plus notice rather than any breach or departure. The lease was commercial, and for a dwelling the duty comes from the residential Act itself.

Leavenworth Plaza Associates, L.P. v. L.A.G. Enterprises, 28 Kan. App. 2d 269, 16 P.3d 314 (2000) (Kansas Court of Appeals; arose from a commercial lease; bears on the duty to re-let): The defaulting tenant, not the landlord, bore the burden of proving that the landlord failed to exercise reasonable efforts to mitigate damages, because mitigation is an affirmative defense and the burden of proving a failure to mitigate falls on the party asserting it. Whether mitigation was reasonable calls for a case-by-case examination of the totality of the circumstances, and the duty is bounded by common sense and reasonableness. The lease was a commercial one in a shopping center, and the burden rule the court applied comes from the state's general civil-damages authorities rather than from lease law.