Which Kansas Percentage Opens Which Benefit

Kansas is the most orderly state in this catalog about what a disability rating buys. The same three-part definition appears in statute after statute and only the percentage changes, so a veteran can read the ladder off the code. Any compensable rating opens the public employment preference. The definition of disabled veteran in 73-201(a)(3) requires a service-connected evaluation and sets no floor at all. That same section also uses a rating for one exclusion: a person who retired at pay grade O-4 or above has no preference unless they retired from combat wounds or hold a rating of 10 percent or more. Thirty percent opens two things. The free permanent hunting and fishing licence under 32-934, and the disabled veteran business contract preference under 73-230. Fifty percent opens three. The free disabled veteran licence plate and its parking privileges under 8-160 and 8-161, the homestead property tax refund under 79-4508, and the property tax freeze under 79-4508a. Fifty is the level at which Kansas starts handing over money on the house. Eighty percent opens the Kansas hero's scholarship for a dependent or spouse under 75-4364, and Kansas uses 80 for nothing else. One hundred percent, permanent, opens the two largest tax provisions: the additional personal exemption in 79-32,121(b), which asks for receipt of compensation at the 100 percent rate, and the sales tax exemption in 79-3606h, which asks for a 100 percent disability or a determination of total disability or unemployability. Both accept unemployability as a route and both require permanence. The wording of the definition matters as much as the number. Where Kansas uses its standard definition, it says the person must have served in the active military, naval, air or space service "including those groups and individuals listed under 38 C.F.R. 3.7", and must have been "discharged or released therefrom under an honorable discharge or a general discharge under honorable conditions". Both clauses are doing real work. The regulation picks up the WASPs, certain Merchant Marine service and the other civilian groups given veteran status retroactively. And the general discharge clause means a veteran whose separation was less than fully honorable is still inside the programme. Two Kansas programmes break that pattern, and they are the two worth checking first. Section 79-32,121(b), the income tax exemption, and 79-3606h, the sales tax exemption, both require an honorable discharge and neither carries the general discharge language. A veteran with a general discharge under honorable conditions holds the plate, the licence, the property tax refunds, the employment preference and the business preference, and is shut out of both tax exemptions. Two more definitions run on something other than a rating. The veterans homes in 76-1908 and 76-1954 use "conditions other than dishonorable", which is the widest discharge test in the Kansas code, and print a two-year Kansas residency bar that nothing else imposes, though Attorney General Opinion 92-74 found that bar unconstitutional in 1992 and the Office of Veterans Services now treats residency only as a preference. And the hero's scholarship reaches a family whose servicemember was medically separated, asking whether the injury rendered them incapable of continuing to serve rather than asking for a percentage at all. The practical consequence: in Kansas, being turned down for one programme genuinely does tell you something about the others, because the ladder is consistent. Find the rung, then check the discharge clause, then check residency.