Neither Missouri Nor Kansas Charges You a Transfer Tax. Kansas Repealed Its Mortgage Tax in 2019 — and Replaced It With a Recording Fee Nobody Explains at the Closing Table.

Here is the good news, and I want you to have it before anything else, because it is genuinely one of the better things about buying a house in this metro:

Neither Missouri nor Kansas is going to tax you for the privilege of the transfer.

No documentary stamp. No deed tax. No percentage of the purchase price skimmed at the door. If you are coming from Pennsylvania, Washington, Florida, New York, Delaware — anywhere that treats a closing as a taxable event — the number you have been bracing for is not on this Closing Disclosure. Missouri put the prohibition in its own constitution. Voters passed Amendment 3 on November 2, 2010, and Art. X, § 25 now says the state, counties, and other political subdivisions are "prevented from imposing any new tax, including a sales tax, on the sale or transfer of homes or any other real estate."

Kansas doesn't have one either. What Kansas has instead is a fee, and the story of that fee is the most useful thing on this page.

Kansas killed its mortgage tax. Half the internet hasn't noticed.

Until recently, Kansas ran a mortgage registration tax: before your mortgage could be recorded, you paid the register of deeds a percentage of the loan. Not the house — the loan. K.S.A. 79-3102 set it at 0.26% of the principal debt. On a $400,000 mortgage that was $1,040, in cash, at the table, for the act of filing a document.

In 2014, HB 2643 phased it out over five years and raised recording fees to backfill the counties. Here is the whole schedule, from the enrolled bill:

The Kansas Revisor's own page for K.S.A. 79-3102 now carries a one-line epitaph: "Repealed, L. 2014, ch. 140, § 22; January 1, 2019."

That is a real, permanent, four-figure savings on a Johnson County closing, and it has been in effect for over seven years. It is also still quoted as live on Kansas City lender blogs and agent sites I could pull up this morning. If a closing quote hands you a line item called "mortgage registration tax," the correct response is not to negotiate it. The correct response is to ask which statute it's charged under, because there isn't one.

What actually replaced it

A per-page fee, and it is on your disclosure whether you notice it or not. Under K.S.A. 28-115, for documents filed on and after January 1, 2018: $17 for the first page, $13 for each additional page. Subsections (b) and (i) then stack another $3 per page and $1 per page on top of that base schedule.

Which means the honest answer to "what will my Kansas recording fee be?" is: it depends on how many pages your mortgage runs, and I am not going to invent a total for you. Ask your title company for the actual quote against the actual page count. That is a five-minute question they can answer exactly.

One trap in the statute worth knowing, because it is the kind of thing that sounds protective and isn't. K.S.A. 28-115(j) caps the recording fee at $125 for a single-family mortgage on a principal residence — where the principal debt is $75,000 or less. Read that threshold again. In the Kansas City market in 2026, a $75,000 first mortgage on a primary residence is close to a null set. The cap is real. It is also, for practical purposes, not for you.

Missouri's version of this is a signature, not a fee

Missouri's oddity sits somewhere else entirely: in the title policy.

RSMo 381.015 requires that when a lender's policy is issued without an owner's policy, the title insurer must give you written notice — on a form the director prescribes, at the time the commitment is prepared — spelling out that the lender's policy protects the lender and not you, and that you may obtain an owner's policy within sixty days of closing at a stated cost. And then you have to sign it. The insurer keeps your signed copy in the underwriting file for fifteen years.

Fifteen years. Sit with that.

That statute is not really consumer protection. It is evidence preservation. It exists so that in year eleven, when a boundary dispute or an old lien surfaces and you say "nobody ever told me I had no coverage," someone can produce a piece of paper with your name on it. The legislature knew exactly what it was doing when it set the retention period longer than most people own the house.

So: buy the owner's policy. Not because the statute makes you — it explicitly contemplates that you might not — but because a law that carefully documents your refusal for fifteen years is a law telling you what the refusal is worth.

The seller cannot make you use their title company

This one is federal, it is short, and almost nobody invokes it.

12 U.S.C. § 2608(a): "No seller of property that will be purchased with the assistance of a federally related mortgage loan shall require directly or indirectly, as a condition to selling the property, that title insurance covering the property be purchased by the buyer from any particular title company."

And subsection (b) supplies the teeth: the seller "shall be liable to the buyer in an amount equal to three times all charges made for such title insurance."

"Federally related mortgage loan" is broad enough to cover essentially every conventional, FHA and VA loan a normal buyer uses. It reads identically in Missouri and in Kansas. And "directly or indirectly" is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence — it reaches the builder addendum, the seller-concession-conditioned-on-using-our-affiliate, the "we'll accept your offer if."

You are allowed to say no.

Now the part that actually saves you money: the tolerance buckets

Everything above is trivia unless you understand this. Reg Z — 12 CFR § 1026.19(e)(3) — sorts every closing cost into three buckets, and the bucket determines whether your lender is legally allowed to raise the number on you between the Loan Estimate and the table.

Read that third row again, because it is the trap and it is set with your own hand.

§ 1026.19(e)(3)(iii)(D) puts "charges paid to third-party service providers selected by the consumer... that are not on the list provided" into the unlimited bucket. Meaning: the moment you find your own title company off the internet instead of picking one off the lender's written list, that charge loses its 10% protection. Not because your lender punished you. Because the regulation says so.

That does not mean don't shop off-list. Sometimes the off-list company is genuinely better or cheaper, and you should take that deal with clear eyes. It means: know what you traded. On-list gets you a 10% ceiling. Off-list gets you a price you had better confirm in writing yourself, because Reg Z will not confirm it for you.

Meanwhile — and this is the part I want you to actually use — the zero-tolerance bucket is where your lender's own money lives. Origination fee, underwriting fee, processing, points. Those cannot move. Not by $50. Not "because rates changed." Not "because the file got complicated." Absent a documented changed circumstance under (e)(3)(iv), the number on the Loan Estimate is the number.

And if they blow it, there is a refund with a clock

12 CFR § 1026.19(f)(2)(v), titled "Refunds related to the good faith analysis," is the only enforcement mechanism most buyers will ever need. If you paid more than the tolerance allows, the creditor complies if it refunds the excess to you no later than 60 days after consummation and mails corrected disclosures reflecting that refund within the same 60 days.

Sixty days. From the day you sign.

Nobody at that table is going to raise their hand and tell you they overcharged you. The Loan Estimate and the final Closing Disclosure are two documents designed to be compared, and in my experience they are almost never compared. Put them side by side. Match the zero-tolerance lines exactly. Add up the 10% bucket and check the aggregate. It takes twenty minutes and it is the single highest-paid twenty minutes of the entire transaction.

The one number I will not give you

You will find a hundred pages telling you who "customarily" pays for the owner's title policy on the Kansas side versus the Missouri side. Some of them will give you a confident percentage split.

I could not verify a customary split against a single primary source — no statute, no regulation, no state filing. It is market convention, it moves with the market, and in a metro that straddles two states it is not even uniform county to county. So I am not printing a number you might carry into a negotiation and lose money on.

What I can tell you, and what is worth more anyway: it is negotiable, RESPA makes it illegal for the seller to force the company, Reg Z makes your lender's estimate enforceable, and Missouri makes you sign a fifteen-year receipt if you walk away from the coverage. Those four facts, used together, are worth more than any custom.

The short version

• Transfer tax: none, either side. Missouri's is constitutionally barred. Kansas simply doesn't have one.
• Kansas mortgage registration tax: dead since January 1, 2019. If it's on your sheet, it's an error.
• Kansas recording fee: $17 first page, $13 each additional, plus $4/page in stacked add-ons. Ask for the page count.
• Title company: your choice, federally protected, three-times damages if a seller conditions the sale on it.
• The lender's own fees: frozen at the Loan Estimate. Zero tolerance.
• Shopping off the lender's list: legal, sometimes smart, and it forfeits your 10% ceiling.
• If they overcharge: 60 days from consummation to get it back.

The closing table is the last place in this transaction where you have leverage and the first place where everybody assumes you've stopped reading. Assume the opposite about yourself.