Where we work
Kitchen Remodeling Service Areas
Kansas City spreads across two states and five separate licensing authorities. Which one applies to your project depends on the address, not the metro — and the differences are real. Overland Park, Olathe and Shawnee all defer to Johnson County for contractor licensing; Leawood licenses its own. Each page below names the authority for that city and links to its verification tool.
Who licenses a contractor, by city
There is no metro-wide contractor licence. Licensing here is municipal or county-level, and five separate authorities cover the eight areas on this site. They do not work the same way.
- Overland Park, Olathe and Shawnee defer to Johnson County. The city issues your permit; the county issues the contractor's licence, and the city will only issue a permit to someone listed as a permittee in the county's system.
- Leawood does not. It issues its own contractor licences through the city and runs its own public search. Checking a Leawood job against the county database is checking the wrong register.
- Kansas City, Missouri requires three things: a business licence, a trade Certificate of Qualification, and the contractor licence itself, all administered under its own code.
- Kansas City, Kansas requires a city occupational tax licence for contractors and subcontractors, with trade masters licensed separately.
- Lee's Summit treats the contractor licence as a business licence, and requires it before a permit is issued or work begins.
Each area page below names its own authority and links to the register where you can check a firm. That is deliberate: sending a Leawood homeowner to the county search would be wrong, and it is the single easiest mistake to make when writing about this metro.
Homeowners acting as their own contractor
Several of these cities allow it, with conditions. Overland Park does not require a homeowner working on their own home to be licensed, but every subcontractor they hire must hold an active county licence. Olathe allows the owner of a single-family home to act as general contractor only where it is their primary residence and they occupy it. If you are considering pulling your own permit, confirm the rule with your city first — the answer differs by address, not by metro.
What is not published
Something worth knowing before you start ringing around: only one of these cities publishes a clear list of kitchen work that needs no permit. The rest either route all remodels through a permit process, name the trades without mentioning kitchens, or publish no kitchen-specific threshold at all. If you cannot find the answer for your city on its website, that is not you missing it — it is genuinely not there, and a phone call to the permit desk is the shortest route.
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