Regulating Ride-Hailing and Delivery Platforms in Kenya: Licensing, Insurance and Consumer Protection

Kenya has had a dedicated regulatory regime for ride-hailing and delivery platforms since 2022, built around national licensing, a capped commission, and mandatory data retention. A recent High Court ruling has just thrown two of that regime’s central pillars into doubt, which makes this a genuinely unsettled area for any platform operating, or planning to launch, in Kenya right now.

The regulatory framework: NTSA licensing, not county

The National Transport and Safety Authority (Transport Network Companies, Owners, Drivers and Passengers) Regulations, 2022, made under Legal Notice No. 120 of 2022 and effective 1 July 2022, put licensing authority for ride-hailing platforms squarely with the NTSA at the national level, not with county governments. An applicant must be a Kenyan-incorporated body corporate, tax compliant, and registered with the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner. The licence fee is KES 100,000 per year, applications are meant to be processed within 14 days, and a licence is valid for one year. Every vehicle used on a transport network platform must carry valid insurance and a roadworthiness certificate, and must be under sixteen years old.

Fare transparency and the commission cap now under constitutional challenge

The regulations require platforms to disclose the estimated fare to a passenger before they accept a ride, and, until recently, capped the platform’s commission at 18% of total trip earnings, barring contract terms designed to push the effective commission higher. That commission cap has just been struck down. In a judgment reported around 3 September 2026, arising from a petition brought by Bolt Operations OÜ, the High Court held that the 18% cap was unconstitutional as applied, on the basis that the government had not demonstrated the cap was necessary or proportionate and had not carried out a proper regulatory impact assessment or public participation process before imposing it, in violation of Article 24 of the Constitution. We were not able to independently confirm the exact case citation for this ruling from a primary source during this research; it is reported consistently across multiple Kenyan business and technology outlets, but a platform relying on it for compliance purposes should confirm the citation and the judgment’s precise terms directly before treating it as settled. Significantly, the court suspended its declaration of invalidity for twelve months, giving the government a window to redo the regulatory process properly; if that is not done within the window, the cap and the data-retention rule addressed below lose force permanently.

Data retention: also struck down, on privacy grounds

The same 2022 regulations required platforms to retain driver, vehicle, passenger, trip, and payment data for three years, shareable with the NTSA, police, or under court order. The same September 2026 ruling found this retention regime unconstitutional as well, characterising it as an unjustified “regime of continuous surveillance” that violated privacy rights, and applying the same twelve-month suspended-invalidity structure. Platforms should not assume the three-year retention duty has simply disappeared; it remains in force during the suspension period unless and until the government’s redo of the regulatory process changes it, or the twelve months lapse without action.

What this means for compliance planning right now

A platform building compliance processes around this regime cannot simply take the 2022 regulations at face value. The licensing mechanics, the insurance and roadworthiness requirements, and the fare-transparency duty are unaffected by the ruling and remain in force. The commission cap and the data-retention duty are, for the next twelve months from the ruling, in a state of suspended invalidity: technically still in effect, but under an order requiring government to justify or replace them, with permanent invalidation the default outcome if it does not. A driver-facing dispute over commission levels during this window, including the pre-litigation notice issued by Transport Workers Union Kenya in November 2025 alleging commission deductions above the legal cap, sits in the same uncertain space; we cover the employment-classification side of that dispute separately in Are Ride-Hailing Drivers Employees or Contractors?. Platforms should treat this as an active regulatory process to monitor over the next year, not a settled outcome to build a permanent compliance position around.

Consumer protection beyond the sector-specific regulations

Independent of the transport-specific regime, Kenya’s Consumer Protection Act prohibits unfair, misleading, and unconscionable trade practices generally, giving riders and drivers a further avenue to challenge platform conduct that falls short of an outright breach of the NTSA regulations. A platform’s terms of service, dispute-resolution process, and fare-disclosure practices should be built to withstand scrutiny under both the sector-specific regime and this general consumer-protection layer, since a practice that survives one may still fail the other.