Kansas issues no state septic installer license; nothing in Kansas statute or regulation
creates one. There is no state licensing board for this trade to look for. What Kansas has instead is
a county instrument, issued by your county under the sanitary code its board of county
commissioners adopted — and the state sits at the approval counter rather than the licensing
counter. K.S.A. 19-3704 puts the state inside the chain without putting it at the window:
where the commissioners decide to act, “they shall prepare such sanitary code and submit it to
the secretary of health and environment for review and approval.” K.S.A. 19-3705 applies the
same procedure to every later amendment. So the Kansas Department of Health and Environment
reviews the code that creates the credential, and issues no credential itself. The first
question on a Kansas job is which county code covers the site.
How far that duty reaches is the whole of this state, and it is worth stating in three steps
rather than one. First, the grant is permissive on both limbs. K.S.A. 19-3702 provides that
“the county commissioners of any county in this state which is served by a local health
department may by resolution adopt a sanitary code or codes”, and adds that “Each sanitary code
may provide for permits, licenses and fees.” May, and may — nothing in Kansas law requires that
a septic installer credential exist anywhere in the state. Second, where a county has used the
grant the duty is real and it is the county’s own adopted words that make it so. The Johnson
County Environmental Sanitary Code — one county’s own instrument, cited to that county and never
as Kansas’s rule — provides that “Every person who conducts the activity of an Onsite Wastewater System
Installer, as defined in the DEFINITIONS section of this code, shall apply for, obtain and
maintain a valid license from JCDHE to perform that activity.” A second county, adopting
independently, writes the same duty its own way: “No person shall install, construct, repair,
or alter an on-site sewage management system without having first obtained an annual installer
license from the Health Department.”, and adds that “No person shall receive an installer
license from the Health Department without having first passed a written examination.” The
consequence of breach is statutory rather than administrative — K.S.A. 19-3707 provides that
“any violation of any provision of a sanitary code shall be deemed to be a misdemeanor”. Third,
the duty stops, and where it stops is written down: K.S.A. 19-3706 provides that the act and
any sanitary code adopted under it “shall not apply to incorporated cities or to any premises
under one ownership which exceeds 10 acres in area, unless such code specifically provides for
a greater acreage limitation, and which is used only for agricultural purposes.” Those three
steps are the whole answer and none of them extends past its own words.
The counter also moves, and sending every Kansas reader to the local health department is the
second reachable mistake here. K.S.A. 19-3703 sets a default and then names an alternative in the same
breath: “Unless otherwise provided by the board of county commissioners, the local health
department shall have the authority and responsibility for administering all sanitary codes.”,
and “The board of county commissioners may designate a county agency other than the local
health department to administer sanitary code regulations concerning sewage and sewage
disposal.” Both branches are in use. One large Kansas county discharges the onsite wastewater
function through its building and construction department, and that department’s own page
describes its environmental and land use section as covering on-site wastewater in the
unincorporated county, extending to several named cities separately — which is the city
boundary of K.S.A. 19-3706 visible in an operating program rather than in a statute book. That
is why the phrase on this page is issued by your county and not the name of a particular kind
of department, and it is also why what is required of a Kansas installer is set by that
county’s own adopted code rather than by a state standard. Two counties, two codes, two written
examinations, and nothing statewide behind either of them.
A search of Kansas law for the word installer will mislead a septic contractor faster than
anything else on this page.
Kansas does license installers at the state level — of other things. K.S.A. 65-34,110(a) makes
it “unlawful for any person to practice, or hold oneself out as authorized to practice, as an
underground storage tank installer or underground storage tank contractor or use other words or
letters to indicate such person is a licensed installer or contractor unless the person is
licensed in accordance with this section.” That is a genuine state license, administered by the
same state department that approves county sanitary codes, and it has nothing to do with
sewage. A separate Kansas regulation, K.A.R. 127-2-3, conditions a manufactured home installer
license on liability insurance — an insurance-conditioned state installer credential, and also
not this trade. Search Kansas regulations for the word installer and every hit belongs to
another trade — underground storage tanks, boilers, manufactured homes, soil-conservation
practice work. So yes, Kansas licenses installers, and a page that stops there is wrong about
the only trade this one is written for. It licenses no septic installer.
Where a county does license this trade, the license carries an insurance condition on its face,
and that is the most operationally relevant fact in the whole Kansas picture. The same Johnson
County code provides that “A licensed Installer shall have and maintain insurance for liability
and workmanship in amounts and forms as designated by the JCDHE, and a copy of the certificate
of insurance shall be filed with JCDHE.” The Johnson County Department of Health and Environment
states the requirement on its own page in its own words, and adds that the installer “may also
be required to be bonded.” Read that shape carefully, because the licensed installer has to have and maintain the
insurance, not show it once at application. The installer has to maintain the insurance and keep the certificate filed with
the department for as long as the license runs, and a bond is not a policy. The amounts are left to the department rather than
fixed in the code, so no figure belongs in a sentence about it — the existence of the filed
certificate condition is the fact that matters. The same code also conditions the license on a
written examination covering sewage treatment techniques, design and construction standards,
treatment theory and hydraulics, and licenses a designer as a separate credential, treating a
licensed installer as able to design only the simplest gravity-fed or pumped system types.
The pumping side runs on the same statutory grant and a different instrument, and Kansas has no
state layer here either: no Kansas statute or regulation creates a septage hauler or pumper
permit. In one county’s adopted code the instrument is an annual sewage
removal permit: “No person, firm or corporation may remove, transport, or dispose of the
contents of septic tanks, or onsite sewage management systems without having first obtained
from the” … “County Health Department an annual sewage removal permit.” Its application has to
name the vehicle and include “Written documentation that sewage removed and transported will be
accepted at disposal sites.”, and the land-application limb provides that “The licensee shall
comply with all the requirements mandated under Title 40, Part 503, of the Code of Federal
Regulations.” The county named here is the second one, whose permit the Lawrence-Douglas County
Health Department issues, cited to that county and never as Kansas’s rule. In the Johnson County
code the same work is a licensed trade —
“Every person who engages in or conducts the activity of a Sanitary Disposal Service Operator,
as defined in Chapter I of this code, shall apply for, obtain and maintain a valid license to
perform that activity.” — carrying the same insurance condition the installer license does: “A
licensed sanitary disposal service operator shall have and maintain insurance for liability and
workmanship in amounts and forms as designated by JCDHE”. Two state instruments look close
enough to reach for and neither is this one: the water pollution control permit under
K.S.A. 65-165 authorizes a discharge and the operation of a wastewater treatment system, and
the solid waste permits run to disposal areas and processing facilities. Kansas defines the
stream a septage load actually is separately, at K.S.A. 65-164, as “any substance that contains
any of the waste products or excrementitious or other discharges from the bodies of human
beings or animals”.
There is no state certification for a septic inspector or evaluator in Kansas, and neither of
the two Kansas county codes read for this page certifies a private one either. That is an absence of a
credential and not an absence of an obligation, and the difference decides who carries what. The
inspection happens: the county sanitary code asks for it, commonly when a property changes
hands, and in these counties it is county staff who perform it. The Johnson County Department of
Health and Environment states its own procedure in its own words — “A resale inspection is a procedure performed by a JCDHE
Environmental Health Specialist to determine the functional status of a private sewage
treatment system.” — and the second county likewise puts the transfer inspection in the health
department’s own hands and has the tank pumped by a licensed hauler before the transfer
completes. That is one county’s own published procedure, cited to that county and never
generalized. The professional-opinion
exposure that a certified private evaluator would carry elsewhere sits, in these counties, with
the county — while the installer’s exposure is enlarged, because “Any work that is done to the
private sewage treatment system must be done by a JCDHE-licensed installer.” A county officer
determines the functional status of the system, and the repair that inspection generates must
be done by a licensed installer who did not build it. Nothing in either county code says a Kansas
contractor may perform that transfer inspection themselves, and this page does not say it.
Workers compensation is the one place Kansas answers at the state level, and it answers by
payroll. The act reaches employment in this state except where it excepts, and the exception a
small septic operator can sit inside is a money threshold rather than a headcount: an employment
“wherein the employer had a total gross annual payroll for the preceding calendar year of not
more than $20,000 for all employees and wherein the employer reasonably estimates that such
employer will not have a total gross annual payroll for the current calendar year of more than
$20,000 for all employees”, at K.S.A. 44-505(a)(2), with wages paid to close family left out of
that payroll. A two-person crew can cross that line while staying under a neighboring state’s
employee-count test, or the reverse, which is why the Kansas sentence and the neighbor’s
sentence must never be swapped. The exception is not an exit: an excepted employer can come
inside the act by joining a qualified pool or by “filing with the director a written statement
of election to accept thereunder”. Where the duty does attach, K.S.A. 44-532(b) gives three routes
and every one of them is private: an authorized carrier, qualified self-insurance, or
membership in a qualified group-funded pool. The same subsection provides that the cost of
carrying that insurance “shall be paid by the employer”, never by the employee. Kansas does have a body called the workers compensation fund:
“There is hereby created in the state treasury the workers compensation fund.” It is financed by
an assessment on the market rather than competing in it, and it is not a place a Kansas septic
contractor places coverage.
One statutory sentence explains why a Kansas general contractor asks a septic sub for a
certificate before the first cut. K.S.A. 44-503(a) provides that where a principal contracts out
work that is part of the principal’s trade or business, “the principal shall be liable to pay to
any worker employed in the execution of the work any compensation under the workers compensation
act which the principal would have been liable to pay if that worker had been immediately
employed by the principal”. K.S.A. 44-503(g) turns that liability off where the contractor is
inside the act and has secured compensation, “as evidenced by a current certificate of workers
compensation insurance”, or by certification of self-insurance or pool membership. So the
certificate request is a statutory reason rather than a custom — and K.S.A. 44-503(d) limits the
section to accidents on or about premises under the principal’s control, which is a real
boundary and is not dropped when the certificate point gets made. One more distinction a
one-person sub gets wrong: the director is barred from fining a self-employed subcontractor for
failing to cover themselves, and is expressly required to enforce the section for that
subcontractor’s other employees.
Almost none of that is an insurance requirement. Two clauses are — the filed certificate on a
county installer license and the same condition on the pumping license — and they are the rare
places where the credential question and the coverage question touch at all.
Everywhere else they are separate questions, and the sections below set out each one with the authority it rests
on, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
