TOPEKA, Kan. — Top Republican lawmakers and the Democratic governor in Kansas have struck a deal to cut taxes after Republican leaders abandoned a move toward a uniform personal income tax, which the governor strongly opposed.
The Kansas House and Senate were expected to vote on the compromise package Thursday or Friday, and Gov. Laura Kelly was expected to sign it if it reaches her desk. The plan would save taxpayers about $1.4 billion over the next three years, but it is smaller than the separate plans approved by each chamber last month and smaller than the plan passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature in January passed and vetoed by Kelly.
GOP leaders wanted to move Kansas to a single income tax rate from the three current rates and lower the top rate from the current 5.7%, which Kelly said would benefit the “super wealthy.” The same dispute thwarted major tax cuts in 2023, when a dozen other states cut income tax rates, according to the conservative Tax Foundation.
The compromise plan maintains three personal income tax rates, but reduces the top rate to 5.5%. Republican leaders did not have the two-thirds majority needed to override a Kelly veto of a single-rate plan, thanks to Republican defectors who, as Senate President Ty Masterson put it on Wednesday, “chained themselves to the tree of progressive taxation.” ”
“So, you know what?” We’re just going to cut down the tree above,” said Masterson, a Wichita-area Republican. “Everything else is a win.”
The bill would also eliminate state income taxes on retirees’ Social Security benefits, which kick in once a person receives $75,000 a year. It would also increase the standard personal income tax deduction, increase the income tax credit for child care expenses, reduce property taxes the state imposes to raise money for public schools and end the 2% sales tax on groceries, which expired six months earlier. by the state. on July 1.
Still, the final deal led to grumbling from both sides. Kelly’s office and Republican leaders worked it out privately rather than three House negotiators and three Senate members drawing up a plan, with some discussions in public.
House Taxation Committee Chairman Adam Smith said before both chambers voted that he didn’t know whether he would support the deal — even though it was his job to explain it to colleagues and would normally promote a plan that was supported by Republican leaders.
“I hear a lot of dissent,” said Smith, a Western Republican from Kansas. “I have to carry the bill, and it’s bad if I don’t even know if I’m going to vote for it.”
Republicans had wanted to cut taxes by between $500 million and $600 million a year, or between $1.5 billion and $1.8 billion over three years. The new plan, worth about $430 million annually, is less generous in increasing the standard deduction than the Senate plan, which boosted the plan for married couples to $22,000 to help lower-income families.
Some lawmakers also said the new plan does not lower property taxes enough given rising home prices and local fees. For the owner of a home with a median value of $210,000 in Kansas, the annual savings would be about $140.
“I don’t think this is enough,” said Sen. Tom Holland of northeastern Kansas, who represented Democratic senators in tax negotiations. “There are monster increases every year.”
The Kansas deal came two weeks after Georgia’s Republican-controlled Legislature passed personal and corporate tax cuts favored by GOP Gov. Brian Kemp. Like Georgia, Kansas has a large budget surplus, still estimated at more than $4 billion at the end of June 2025.
But the tax debates in Kansas are fraught because of a nationally infamous experiment in cutting income taxes in 2012 and 2013 under Republican Gov. Sam Brownback. Large budget deficits followed and continued until the bipartisan legislative majority reversed most of the cuts in 2017 over Brownback’s opposition.
Kelly won the first of her two terms in 2018 by speaking out against Brownback’s budget policies, and she still cites them in her criticism of Republican proposals. She called the Republican plan she vetoed in January fiscally reckless.
Republican leaders repeatedly said they were not repeating the mistakes of 2012 and 2013 and that Kansas, with its huge surplus, could sustain their proposed cuts.
But their failure to override Kelly’s veto made them less willing to risk no cuts this year. This year, all 40 seats in the Senate and 125 seats in the House of Representatives are up for election.
“We have to get something done, and this is a compromise,” said House Speaker Dan Hawkins, a Republican from Wichita. “We have to finish it and get out of here.”
