Kentucky's Open Records Act, KRS 61.870 to 61.884, has been in force since 1976, and the Attorney General publishes an annual guide to the Act under a statutory duty to do so. The definition of a public record is deliberately wide, taking in all books, papers, maps, photographs, cards, tapes, discs, diskettes, recordings, software or other documentation regardless of physical form that a public agency prepared, owns, uses, possesses or retains, which the Attorney General spells out as including email, databases and other electronic records, records not kept on the agency's own premises, and booking photographs. Material stays a public record even when an exemption applies to it, which matters because the agency must then justify the exemption rather than deny that the record exists.
Two filters sit in front of the right. Since June 29, 2021 only residents of the Commonwealth may ask, a term that covers individuals living here, individuals employed and working at a location here, domestic business entities with a Kentucky location, foreign business entities registered with the Secretary of State, anyone representing one of those, and news gathering organisations as separately defined. An agency may not consider who the requester is beyond testing residency, and may not consider why they are asking except to find out whether the records are wanted for a commercial purpose. For Kentucky records held locally, see the Kentucky county pages.
- Five business days: the agency must respond in writing within five business days, and the custodian being away does not extend that.
- A refusal must cite and explain: the response has to name the specific exemption and briefly explain how it applies to the record withheld.
- A free binding ruling: the Attorney General decides an appeal within twenty business days, and the decision becomes law if no court appeal is filed in thirty days.
- Ten cents, no staff time: copying is capped at actual cost of the medium and reproduction, excluding staff time, unless the purpose is commercial.
Written by SearchSystems.net from Kentucky's own systems: the Kentucky Attorney General open records and open meetings pages, the Attorney General's 2025 guide to the Open Records and Open Meetings Acts, the Attorney General's guide published under KRS 15.257, the standardised open records request form, the Finance and Administration Cabinet records request page, each read on October 15, 2026 by the SearchSystems editorial team.
The application, and the form nobody can force on you
A custodian may require the request to be in writing, signed by the requester with the name printed legibly, and describing the records to be inspected, and an electronic signature satisfies that under KRS 369.107. It may be hand delivered, posted, faxed or emailed to the custodian at the address the agency publishes in its rules and regulations, and the custodian may require the written application to explain how the requester qualifies as a resident of the Commonwealth.
The Attorney General has promulgated a standardised request form by administrative regulation that every public agency is required to accept, but the statute cuts both ways on it: an agency may not refuse a request because it did not use that form. Two further rules shape what can usefully be asked. An agency is not obliged to answer a question, the Attorney General's example being how much the city's employees are paid, and is not required to compile information or create a record that does not already exist, but it must honour a request for existing records that contain the information, such as copies of the city's payroll records for May. The practical drafting lesson is to ask for documents, with a date range.
Five business days, and the three kinds of answer
Since June 29, 2021 the agency must respond in writing within five business days of receipt, and the response must come from the official custodian or under their authority, with the Attorney General noting that the custodian's absence does not extend the time and that an acting custodian should be designated. Where the agency does not hold the records, KRS 61.872(4) requires it to say so and to furnish the name and location of the official custodian at the right agency, the worked example being a fiscal court receiving a request for school board minutes and answering with the school board custodian's details.
Where the record is in active use, in storage or otherwise unavailable, KRS 61.872(5) requires a written notice fixing a place, time and date for inspection within five days of the request, and if production cannot happen in that window the agency must write with a detailed explanation of the cause of the delay and state the earliest date the record will be available. Where a request implicates an exceptionally large number of records, an agency may release them in batches as they are gathered and reviewed while it continues processing the rest, which the Attorney General treats as evidence of good faith on appeal, but everything responsive must still arrive by the date the agency's own response promised.
Refusals, and the burden on an agency that pleads burden
A refusal must include a statement of the specific exemption that authorises withholding the record and a brief explanation of how that exemption applies to the record withheld, which means a bare citation is not a compliant answer. Separately, under KRS 61.872(6) an agency may refuse to permit inspection or to post copies where the request places an unreasonable burden on it, or where the custodian believes repeated requests are intended to disrupt the agency's essential functions, but the Attorney General stresses that reliance on that provision must be supported by clear and convincing evidence, a high burden of proof, and lists the factors weighed against it: the number of records implicated, the period of time covered, the physical location of the records, whether they are in physical or electronic form, and whether they contain information that state or federal law requires to be redacted.
An agency pleading burden with nothing but an assertion of inconvenience will lose on appeal.
What copies cost, and who pays for redaction
A resident may obtain copies of all nonexempt records on payment of a reasonable fee including postage, and prepayment may be required. Records must be made available in standard electronic or standard paper format according to the request where the agency keeps them in both, and where it keeps them only on paper it must supply paper, with no duty to convert. The fee may not exceed the agency's actual costs of copying, meaning the cost of the medium and of mechanically reproducing the record, and expressly not including staff costs, with ten cents a page generally treated as reasonable for paper under the regulation.
Some offices, such as county clerks, have higher statutory rates. The rule that most often decides a dispute is about redaction: where an agency converts an electronic record to paper in order to redact exempt material, it may not charge a copying fee at all, because the costs of redaction cannot be passed to the requester, as the Court of Appeals held in Department of Kentucky State Police v. Courier Journal. Commercial requesters are treated differently.
Where the purpose is commercial, the agency may charge a higher fee that can include the staff time ordinarily unchargeable, and may require any requester to certify the purpose before producing records. Commercial purpose means any use by which the user expects a profit through commission, salary or fee, and excludes print or electronic media and attorneys representing parties in litigation.
The Attorney General appeal, and why it matters
A requester may appeal a refusal, or conduct that subverts the intent of the Act short of a refusal, to the Attorney General, who will not take an appeal unless it includes a copy of the written request and of the written denial where one was issued. The office notifies the agency by email to its official custodian or known attorney, takes the agency's written response, may request further documentation and in some circumstances the disputed records themselves, which it will not disclose, and decides whether the Act was violated with the burden of proof on the agency.
Its reach has limits worth knowing. It cannot declare that records exist where the agency says they do not, even where a statute suggests they should, and following University of Kentucky v. Hatemi a requester who disputes that must first make a prima facie case for existence, by citing a law requiring the record to be created or other evidence, after which the Attorney General examines whether the agency's search was adequate.
Decisions issue within twenty business days, extendable by a further thirty business days. Either side may appeal to the circuit court for the county where the agency has its principal place of business or where the record is kept, with the Attorney General notified but never named as a party. And if no appeal is filed within thirty days, the decision has the force and effect of law and can be enforced in circuit court, which is what makes the Kentucky route worth using before a lawsuit rather than after.
What a court can add
In circuit court a requester who prevails may be awarded costs including reasonable attorney fees where the court finds the records were wilfully withheld, and the court may also award up to twenty five dollars for each day the requester was denied the right to inspect. An agency official who wilfully conceals or destroys records with intent to violate the Act may face criminal penalties under KRS 61.991, and an official who fails to produce records after a final judgment ordering production may be held in contempt.
For a requester, the practical sequence in Kentucky is therefore cheap before it is expensive: a written request, a five day answer, a free appeal that can end as binding law, and only then a court.
Questions about public records requests in Kentucky
Related Kentucky records
Kentucky's other public records guides on this site are the Kentucky background check guide for the State Police criminal record service, the Kentucky court records guide for the Administrative Office of the Courts, the Kentucky arrest records guide for what a booking makes public, and the Kentucky county pages for every county office.