Government-Ordered Fare Hikes and the Regulation of Ride-Hailing Platforms in Kenya

Kenya’s ride-hailing sector has just had its central piece of driver protection regulation suspended by the High Court, twelve days before this article was written. The 18% commission cap that Uber and Bolt drivers had relied on since 2022 no longer has legal force for at least a year, and the government now has to redo the rulemaking process that created it or lose the cap permanently. That ruling lands in the middle of an already tangled picture: an informal ministry directive ordering fare increases, a separate 2022 regulatory regime that never set fares at all, and open questions about competition law and data protection that neither the strikes nor the litigation have resolved.

The Commission Cap the Court Has Now Suspended

Legal Notice 120 of 2022, the NTSA (Transport Network Companies, Owners, Drivers and Passengers) Regulations, took effect on 1 July 2022 and set the terms platforms had to build into every driver agreement. Regulation 9(2)(g) capped the commission a transport network company could charge a driver or vehicle owner at 18% of total trip earnings, and regulation 9(3) added an anti-circumvention clause barring any contract term designed to push the effective commission above that ceiling. On 2 September 2026, the High Court, in a challenge brought by Bolt Operations OÜ, found the regulations unconstitutional, citing the absence of a regulatory impact statement, the lack of parliamentary scrutiny given that the regulations were gazetted during a parliamentary recess, and an unjustified interference with contractual autonomy. Different outlets report the reasoning extending further, into equal-treatment concerns about digital platforms being regulated differently from traditional taxi operators, and into data protection concerns about the regulations’ driver-monitoring requirements. The court suspended its own declaration of invalidity for twelve months rather than striking the regulations down immediately, giving the government a year to run a proper regulatory process, including the public participation and parliamentary scrutiny the original 2022 instrument skipped, or see the commission cap lose legal force for good.

The Fare Directive Came From a Different, Weaker Source

Separately, and before the court ruling, the Ministry of Roads and Transport wrote to Uber and Bolt in November 2025 directing them to raise per-kilometre fares to match benchmark rates the Automobile Association of Kenya had published back in 2023 but which had never been enforced. Reporting on this directive settled on “50% increase” as a shorthand, but the underlying per-kilometre figures do not move uniformly: small-engine vehicle rates rose from roughly KES 22 to KES 33.1 per kilometre, a 50% increase, while medium-engine vehicle rates rose from roughly KES 26 to KES 36.8, closer to 41.5%. This directive did not come from the National Transport and Safety Authority acting under its licensing powers, and it was not issued under the 2022 TNC Regulations, which never contained a fare-setting or minimum-fare provision in the first place, only a requirement that estimated fares be disclosed to passengers before a ride is accepted. It was an enforcement letter from a ministry director invoking a benchmark that had no independent regulatory force of its own, giving the platforms seven days to respond. That informality matters: unlike the commission cap, which was at least a gazetted regulation that a court could strike down or suspend, the fare directive rests on considerably thinner legal ground, and its binding force is genuinely open to question.

NTSA Does Have Fare Powers, It Simply Did Not Use Them Here

The NTSA Act, 2013 gives the Authority real statutory hooks for fares that neither the 2022 Regulations nor the November 2025 directive actually relied on. Section 30(2)(c) lets the Authority impose licence conditions specifying maximum or minimum charges, and section 30(3)(a) lets it impose conditions ensuring that fares are “reasonable” and preserve fair competition. Those powers were not the source of either the commission cap or the fare directive discussed above, both instruments took a different, narrower or less formal route, and that gap is itself worth watching. A future, properly gazetted NTSA fare regulation built on section 30, following the public participation process the court’s ruling now requires for any replacement commission cap, would sit on considerably firmer legal ground than either of the two mechanisms currently in play.

Where Competition and Data Protection Law Fit

A government-mandated fare floor is a state directive rather than an agreement between Uber and Bolt, so it sits outside the price-fixing provisions in sections 21 and 22 of the Competition Act, 2010, which target agreements between undertakings, not government orders. The more interesting question runs the other way: whether a platform’s own unilateral control over commissions and pricing could itself raise abuse-of-dominance issues under section 24, given the drivers’ complaints about one-sided contract terms. No public evidence indicates the Competition Authority of Kenya has opened an inquiry into either question. On data protection, sections 35 and 36 of the Data Protection Act, 2019 give data subjects rights around automated decision-making and a right to object to processing absent a compelling legitimate interest, provisions squarely relevant to algorithmic fare-setting, ratings-based deactivation and location tracking regardless of how the employment-status question is eventually resolved, and reportedly part of the High Court’s reasoning in the September 2026 ruling as well.