General Liability
The foundation Kansas hospitals and health systems expect, commonly at $1 million per occurrence and $2 million aggregate.
General liability coverage
Coverage by State
Kansas Home Care Insurance
For agencies already operating in Kansas. If a hospital, health system or payer has handed you a contract demanding limits your current policy cannot reach, that is a solvable problem, and it does not have to wait for your renewal date.
If you already run a Kansas home care agency
Here is the short answer. When a contract demands limits your policy cannot reach, the fix is general liability at the limit the contract names, professional liability sized to the care you deliver, an umbrella behind both, and certificates carrying the additional insured and waiver wording specified. We place that through exclusive carrier programs writing home care in Kansas, mid-term when the contract will not wait.
Two Kansas details are worth a look on an established program. The licence is one licence with three scopes, and the scope rather than the licence number is what a carrier underwrites against. And the annual filing under K.S.A. 65-5104 cancels a licence automatically when it is late, with no warning letter first.
An agency running seventy-five to a hundred caregivers across Wichita, the Kansas side of Kansas City, Topeka or the western counties has a different problem from a startup, and this page is written for the former.
What Kansas contracts require, and what happens when yours falls short
On liability the numbers come from your contracts rather than a statute, and they ask more than the law does.
What the contracts typically ask for
Hospitals, health systems and payers usually require general liability at $1 million per occurrence and $2 million aggregate. Professional liability is expected of agencies delivering skilled care. Workers compensation at statutory limits with employers liability behind it. Auto liability for agency vehicles and caregivers driving their own. Abuse and molestation coverage, increasingly named rather than assumed. And an umbrella, which agencies working with the larger Wichita and Kansas City systems often need.
Wording matters as much as the number. Contracts routinely ask for additional insured status, a waiver of subrogation, primary and non-contributory response, and advance notice of cancellation. Each is an endorsement rather than a sentence on a certificate.
Your scope shapes what a counterparty expects. An agency describing itself simply as licensed tells a carrier very little here, because the same licence number sits behind a supportive care book and a skilled services book. Say which scopes you hold when you send the exhibit, because it changes what we build.
When the contract asks for more than you carry
The first route is endorsement. The incumbent carrier will sometimes raise a limit or add required wording mid-term for additional premium, the fastest path where it is available.
The second is an umbrella. Where a contract wants a total your primary layers cannot reach, excess limits stacked over general liability, auto and employers liability get there quicker and for less than rebuilding the primary underneath.
The third is re-marketing, where a carrier will not extend or the wording sits outside what the form allows. That takes longer, which is the argument for sending contract language when it first appears rather than the week it has to be signed.
Certificates of insurance and the rest of the operating year
For a running agency the broker relationship is mostly certificates and mid-term changes. Both are where a placement quietly fails.
Certificates
A certificate is evidence, not coverage; it states only what a policy already does. If a Wichita health system requires additional insured status and your policy carries no such endorsement, no certificate can create it. The delay agencies feel there is an underwriter deciding, not paperwork.
So the habit that helps: when a new client, facility or payer sends paperwork, send us the requirements immediately. Certificates already on file should carry over rather than be rebuilt each year.
What to report during the year
Adding and removing caregivers does not require a policy change each time, because the program is rated on payroll and headcount and trued up at audit. What needs reporting is a change in the agency's shape.
- Adding a KDHE scope, particularly moving into Skilled Services, which changes the professional liability picture entirely.
- A new office, or a move into western counties where a single visit can be most of a shift.
- Taking on HCBS work, which is its own scope and tends to carry its own contract requirements.
- Caregivers regularly working over the Missouri, Nebraska, Colorado or Oklahoma line.
- Agency-owned vehicles, which need commercial auto rather than a caregiver reimbursement arrangement.
- An acquisition, a new entity or a change of ownership, and any incident that could become a claim, reported when it happens rather than when it is served.
The payroll audit at the end of the term is worth preparing for. Records split properly by class keep it from producing an unwelcome additional premium.
Coverages Kansas home care agencies carry
The full program, sized to your payroll, scopes, and driving. Each coverage has a page of its own.
Professional Liability
Clinical claims coverage weighted for agencies operating the Skilled Services scope, heavier than non-medical supportive care work.
Professional liability coverageWorkers Compensation
Required above $20,000 of total gross annual payroll under K.S.A. 44-505, with no employee-count test and family wages left out of the computation.
Workers compensation coverageCommercial Auto
Coverage for agency-owned vehicles carrying caregivers through metro traffic and across long western routes.
Commercial auto coverageHired and Non-Owned Auto
For caregivers driving their own cars for work, a short metro run or a long county route alike.
Hired and non-owned autoAbuse and Molestation
Coverage of up to $1 million for allegations standard liability excludes, essential given caregivers work alone with vulnerable clients inside their homes.
Abuse and molestation coverageUmbrella Liability
Excess limits stacked on your liability and auto, the efficient way to reach the totals Wichita and Kansas City system contracts require.
Umbrella liability coverageCyber Liability
Breach response for the protected health information your agency holds: notification, ransomware, regulatory defense.
Cyber liability coverageProperty and Business Owners Policy
Cover for the office, its contents, and business interruption after a loss.
Home care agency insuranceProvider types we insure in Kansas
Home Care Agencies
Agencies operating the Non-Medical Supportive Care Services scope, delivering personal care and companion work.
Home care agency insuranceHome Health Agencies
Agencies operating the Skilled Services scope, delivering care under a plan of care and certified for Medicare participation.
Home health agency insurancePersonal Care Services
Bathing, dressing, grooming, and daily living support, the core of a supportive care book.
Personal care services coverageSenior Care Providers
Agencies serving the roughly 513,000 Kansas residents aged 65 and older.
Senior care coveragePrivate Duty Nursing
Skilled, high-acuity care that drives professional liability limits higher, often with an umbrella behind it.
Private duty nursing coverageGroup Home Care
Residential group homes combining a facility with hands-on care, carrying premises and property exposure.
Group home care coverageKansas workers compensation for home care agencies
Kansas measures payroll rather than people, and it is worth reading slowly if you have operated anywhere else.
A money test, not a headcount
K.S.A. 44-505 provides that the workers compensation act shall apply to all employments wherein employers employ employees within this state, except that such act shall not apply to a list that follows. First on that list is an employer with a total gross annual payroll for the preceding calendar year of not more than $20,000. So the act starts by covering everything, and the way out is a money figure. Above $20,000, the act applies. Coverage is administered by the Kansas Department of Labor, Division of Workers Compensation.
Most states set a number of employees. Three in North Carolina, five in several southern states, one in a good many more. Kansas sets none. The section we are working from contains no employee-count test at all, so whether you have one caregiver or fifteen is not what decides the question. Counting heads gives the wrong answer in both directions, and it is the single most common way an operator moving into Kansas gets this wrong. Read how the coverage works on our workers compensation page.
Family wages come out of the calculation
K.S.A. 44-505 states that no wages paid to an employee who is a member of the employer's family by marriage or consanguinity shall be included as part of the total gross annual payroll.
Read what that does and does not do. It is a rule about the computation: those wages are left out when you total the payroll against the $20,000 figure. If your payroll sits near the line, whether family wages are in or out may decide the answer, and it is worth having a Kansas adviser run it rather than assuming.
The first-year estimate has to be reasonable
The statute deals with the first-year problem directly. An employer with no preceding calendar year payroll is excepted if it reasonably estimates that such employer will not have a total gross annual payroll for the current calendar year of more than $20,000. Reasonably is doing real work in that sentence, and an estimate made honestly in January still has to be revisited when the book grows faster than expected. That matters to an established agency running a newly formed entity for an acquisition or a second location.
The other exceptions in the section
Alongside the payroll exception, K.S.A. 44-505 excepts agricultural pursuits and employments incident thereto, and it addresses firefighters and real estate agents under specified conditions. Those are the exceptions we have confirmed in the text of the section itself. We are not going to summarise what is not there. An exception you assume rather than establish is not much use at claim time.
Kansas licensing and regulatory context
Short version, because you already hold your licence. It earns space for two reasons: the scope structure is the underwriting fact, and one filing deadline can cancel a licence without warning.
Kansas is structured differently from most states. There is no separate non-medical home care licence here. Non-medical work is a scope under the Home Health Agency licence, issued by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment through its Bureau of Facilities and Licensing, which handles state licensing and federal certification for acute and continuing care providers. KDHE publishes three scopes, each with its own page and its own requirements: Skilled Services, HCBS, and Non-Medical Supportive Care Services.
So a Kansas operator holds one licence and works within the scope or scopes it is approved for, and the scope is what a carrier underwrites against. A supportive care book and a skilled services book sit in different places on professional liability, and the same licence number can sit behind either.
One deadline earns its place here. K.S.A. 65-5104 carries an annual report and annual fee obligation, and KDHE is explicit that late filing brings automatic licence cancellation. Automatic is the word to notice: this is not a process that begins with a warning letter and a chance to respond, so it belongs on a calendar with a reminder rather than in somebody's memory. A lapsed licence is a problem for your contracts as well as your regulator, because the certificates on file with your counterparties assume you still hold it.
Medicare, payers and what actually sets your limits
Medicare covers short-term skilled home health under a plan of care, and KDHE handles federal certification alongside state licensing. That work raises the stakes on documentation and on professional liability, and it sits on a different footing from non-medical supportive care.
The fact that HCBS is its own KDHE scope is worth noting for what it implies about your book. Publicly funded in-home work and purely private-pay non-medical work are treated as different things at the licensing level, and they tend to come with different contract requirements attached.
What sets your limits is neither programme. It is the hospitals, health systems and payers you contract with, which is why we ask to see the contract language rather than guessing at a number. If your agency runs skilled care, our home health agency insurance page covers how that program is built. For the non-medical side, see personal care services.
The Kansas home care market
Kansas has about 2.97 million residents, roughly 513,000 of them 65 or older, close to 17.6 percent of the civilian population. The demand is steady and the geography is the operating problem.
The population sits in two anchors. Wichita, at about 661,000, is the largest metropolitan area wholly inside the state. The Kansas City area, at about 2.25 million, spans the Missouri line and holds much of the eastern population on the Kansas side. Topeka at about 233,000, along with Lawrence and Manhattan, follow.
Everything west of that is sparsely settled with long drives between clients. A caregiver working Johnson County or Wichita makes short trips through steady traffic, where the exposure is accident frequency. A caregiver covering western Kansas drives long, open stretches where a single visit can be most of a shift and help is a long way off. An agency running both out of one office is running the same service under completely different road conditions.
Agency-owned vehicles need commercial auto, and caregivers using their own cars create a hired and non-owned auto exposure a personal policy will not cover on a work trip. The eastern edge of the state faces outward: the Kansas City metropolitan area spans the Missouri line, so agencies there work across a state border as a matter of routine, and the rules on the far side are not the ones this page describes. Operators working the western and southern borders can read our Colorado and Oklahoma pages, and the full list is on our coverage by state hub.
Kansas resources for home care providers
The sources behind everything above.
- KDHE Home Health Agencies, the licence all three scopes sit under.
- Non-Medical Supportive Care Services and Skilled Services, the scope pages.
- KDHE Bureau of Facilities and Licensing, which handles state licensing and federal certification.
- K.S.A. 44-505, the workers compensation section carrying the payroll threshold and the exceptions.
- Kansas Department of Labor, Division of Workers Compensation, which administers the act.
- Kansas Home Care & Hospice Association, the state home care and hospice industry body.
- National Association for Home Care and Hospice, for national home care standards and guidance.
Why Kansas agencies choose HCBI
We work with agencies already running, and their problems are contract problems.
A health system raises its required limits at renewal. A payer adds abuse and molestation as a named requirement. A facility wants additional insured status and primary and non-contributory wording your form does not carry. A caregiver crash on a long western route exposes how little a personal auto policy does on a work trip. That is why we ask for the insurance exhibit rather than a summary.
On Kansas specifically, we start from the payroll figure rather than the headcount, because K.S.A. 44-505 contains no employee-count test and family wages come out of the calculation entirely. We also ask which KDHE scopes you hold, since the same licence number sits behind a supportive care book and a skilled services book, and we check that the K.S.A. 65-5104 annual filing is on a calendar, because late filing cancels the licence automatically.
We place coverage through exclusive carrier programs that write home care risks, and we coordinate the whole program: general liability, professional liability, workers compensation, commercial and hired and non-owned auto for metro traffic and long western routes alike, umbrella limits to reach what your contracts demand, cyber, and abuse and molestation coverage of up to $1 million. That reach is backed by working relationships across the home care and healthcare industry, including CareerStaff Unlimited and Genesis Healthcare in staffing, HOMELINK in the medical equipment and home care network space, and Bright Horizons Family Solutions on the family care side.
Kansas home care insurance FAQ
Answers for agencies operating under Kansas rules.
Usually, and usually before renewal. The underlying general liability limit can sometimes be raised by endorsement. More often an umbrella stacked over general liability, auto and employers liability reaches the required total faster and for less than rebuilding the primary program. Where the carrier will not extend, the program is re-marketed. Send us the insurance exhibit rather than a summary, because the required wording matters as much as the number.
The certificate is quick. What takes time is anything it has to evidence that your policy does not yet do: additional insured status for a named health system, a waiver of subrogation, primary and non-contributory wording, or a notice of cancellation. Those are endorsements, not lines typed onto a form. Send us contract wording when it first arrives, not on the day the certificate is due.
Not person by person. The program is rated on payroll and headcount estimates and trued up at audit, so ordinary turnover does not require a policy change. What does need reporting is a change in what the agency does: adding a KDHE scope, a new office or territory, taking on HCBS work, agency-owned vehicles, or regular work over a state line.
It turns on payroll rather than on headcount. K.S.A. 44-505 provides that the workers compensation act shall apply to all employments wherein employers employ employees within this state, except for a list that follows, and first on that list is an employer with a total gross annual payroll for the preceding calendar year of not more than $20,000. So the act starts by covering everything and the way out is a money figure. Most states set an employee count; Kansas sets none, so counting heads gives the wrong answer in both directions. Coverage is administered by the Kansas Department of Labor, Division of Workers Compensation.
No. K.S.A. 44-505 states that no wages paid to an employee who is a member of the employer's family by marriage or consanguinity shall be included as part of the total gross annual payroll. It is a rule about the computation, so those wages are left out when you total payroll against the figure. If your payroll sits near the line, whether family wages are in or out may decide the answer, and it is worth having a Kansas adviser run it rather than assuming.
It cancels the licence automatically. K.S.A. 65-5104 carries an annual report and annual fee obligation, and KDHE is explicit that late filing brings automatic licence cancellation. Automatic is the word to notice: there is no warning letter and no chance to respond first, so it belongs on a calendar with a reminder rather than in somebody's memory. A lapsed licence is a problem for your contracts as well as your regulator, because the certificates on file with your counterparties assume you still hold it.
The scope, not the number. Kansas has no separate non-medical home care licence: non-medical work is a scope under the Home Health Agency licence issued by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment through its Bureau of Facilities and Licensing. KDHE publishes three scopes, each with its own requirements, being Skilled Services, HCBS, and Non-Medical Supportive Care Services. An agency describing itself simply as licensed tells a carrier very little, because the same licence number can sit behind a supportive care book or a skilled services book, and those sit in different places on professional liability.
Loss runs for the last five years, current declarations pages for every line, payroll by class, caregiver headcount, the counties you serve, and the insurance exhibits from your largest contracts. Start sixty to ninety days out. A non-renewal shortens the list of carriers, and lead time buys the options back.
Send us the contract and we will build to it
Tell us your payroll and caregiver count, which KDHE scopes you hold, and how far west your routes run, and what your largest contract requires. If a limit needs raising before your renewal date, say so and we will start there. A specialist will build the program through exclusive carriers that write home care in Kansas. There is no obligation.