The 2026 session of the Kentucky General Assembly begins Jan. 6, with lawmakers convening in Frankfort until mid-April.
The primary obligation of the legislature is to pass a two-year budget for state government, but leadership of the GOP supermajority in both chambers have also signaled legislation they’ll file to address specific policies and issues.
Education will be one priority — though Republicans so far appear unlikely to pick up on the call from Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear to fully fund universal pre-K.
Kentucky voters rejected a proposed constitutional amendment in 2024 to allow public money to go to private education, but some GOP lawmakers have new hope on the issue thanks to federal legislation on scholarship tax credits.
Republicans have also zeroed in on the financial woes of the school districts in Jefferson and Fayette counties, saying they plan to address both districts head on.
Lawmakers have also indicated that hyperscale data centers will be another session priority, a year after they passed tax incentives to lure the energy-guzzling facilities hosting artificial intelligence services. Republicans say they want to help utilities expand the power generation needed to serve them — including nuclear — but also address concerns from local communities about the higher power bills and where they are located.
A housing task force convening in 2025 gave recommendations for the legislature to address shortages and affordability, which may advance in the form of numerous bills tackling regulations and incentives.
Republicans have also previewed bills they expect to file on immigration enforcement, Medicaid oversight, firearms and drivers licenses.
Here’s a closer look at some of the legislation lawmakers are expected to consider in Frankfort over the coming four months.
Scholarship tax credits and urban school district woes
GOP lawmakers have long said they want to overhaul Kentucky’s education system, dissatisfied by low test scores. After a constitutional amendment to allow the use of state funds outside of public schools failed at the ballot box last year, “school choice” supporters have had few avenues in Kentucky. But since the passage of Trump’s tax and spending bill this past summer, state officials have the ability to opt into a federal scholarship tax credit program that may bypass prohibitions in the state constitution.
Under the tax incentive, people get a one-to-one credit up to $1,700 every year for contributions to K-12 “scholarship granting organizations.” GOP Sen. David Givens, the president pro tempore from Greensburg, said he expects to authorize the incentives and set up guardrails in the coming session.
“Would you rather send your money to Washington D.C. or pay to fund education in Kentucky? Dollar for dollar up to $1,700,” Givens said. “Once we get the infrastructure in place to do it, please be a promoter. Those scholarship grant funds can then go to help students, help systems, help kids in the commonwealth.”
Givens has also hinted at legislation that would force changes at Kentucky’s two largest school districts in Jefferson and Fayette counties. Fayette County Public Schools has especially come under fire for excessive spending on travel and meals, as the district now faces a $16 million shortfall. Meanwhile, Jefferson County Public Schools is facing down an even larger $188 million deficit.
“I think our priority legislation this session is going to involve at least two pieces of legislation targeted specifically to the concerns that you've raised here about Jefferson County and Fayette County and the way that we need to approach that,” Givens said.
However, Givens made those comments before the state Supreme Court ruled against a previous legislative attempt to specifically limit the power of the Jefferson County Board of Education while affecting no other school board. After initially allowing the legislation, the court reheard the case and reversed course, striking down the law as unconstitutional for targeting specific cities or districts.
Beshear again seeks universal pre-K
Meanwhile, Gov. Andy Beshear has pushed hard for his big-ticket education agenda, primarily universal pre-K for Kentucky four year olds. Beshear has tried to advance universal pre-K in past sessions, but never picked up enough support from Republicans.
“We received a lot of feedback, and it's different now from where it started, there's a couple of different options on how it can be done, including ways that previous Republican controlled chambers have voted for it in the past,” Beshear told Kentucky Public Radio. “We're seeing a lot of rank and file members from both parties get fully behind it.”
“One of the biggest steps we've got to take if we want to compete with 18 other states that are telling businesses that they have pre-K for four year olds, which frees up more of the workforce, is to get it passed here,” Beshear said.
GOP Senate President Robert Stivers of Manchester — a longtime skeptic of the efficacy of pre-K — said county judges and chambers of commerce have been getting “a lot of phone calls” from those wanting them to get on board with Beshear’s plan.
“We're going to set policy based on what we think is good policy, not political arm twisting,” Stivers said.
Republican leadership has also not taken up Beshear’s proposals for across-the-board teacher raises or increased state funding for childcare. The Kentucky Education Association and Beshear have said universal raises are the best way to cut through the state’s teacher shortage.
Stivers cited a statistic that 34 school districts reported having no unfilled positions, compared to the year before when just one district could say as much.
“I think we've done a pretty good job, just by the statistics that were related to you all here,” Stivers said. “We're having more and more teachers staying and filling unfilled positions.”
KEA President Joel Wolford, a school librarian in Russell County, noted that 34 districts with full staff is an improvement, but still represents less than 20% of school districts. He said the General Assembly has passed some legislation that helped teachers, like the Red Tape Reduction Act to reduce paperwork duties, but it’s not enough.
“In the end, it will be the bread and butter issues. It'll be pay, retirement, health care, and some of the other issues that are hurting retention throughout the state are going to have to be addressed,” Wolford said.
Jim Flynn, the executive director of the Kentucky Association of School Superintendents, said there are still more than 2,400 educator vacancies statewide. He said districts are relying more heavily on substitute teachers, emergency teacher certifications and bigger workloads for existing staff to manage the shortages.
Flynn said via email that “the shortage has evolved, not ended,” as he called for more investment to build the educator workforce.
Energy and data centers
Large tech companies like Meta, Microsoft, Google and Amazon are in a race to build giant data centers across the country that host their artificial intelligence and cloud services. There are two big factors they are looking for when deciding where to locate the data centers: Tax breaks and access to the large amount of power they will need to run them.
Attempting to lure such multi-billion dollar developments to Kentucky, the legislature already delivered the first ask in the 2025 session, passing a bill exempting data centers from sales and use taxes for 50 years on their computer equipment. Now, Republican lawmakers and electric utilities say Kentucky needs to do more to expand its power generation capacity.
Louisville Gas & Electric and Kentucky Utilities already sought and received permission from state regulators to spend $3 billion to build new gas power plants they say will be needed to serve future data centers — but lawmakers say that’s only scratching the surface of power needs.
While the legislature passed bills in recent years to prevent utilities from retiring old coal plants, Republican Sen. Danny Carroll of Paducah says the future of power generation in Kentucky is nuclear. Building off a new company enriching fuel for power reactors in Paducah, Carroll wants the state to spend $75 million on a pilot project to set up three sites for nuclear reactors in Kentucky that would power future data centers.
However, nuclear power is still years away from being possible in Kentucky, and companies are already looking to locate in the state right now — drawing, so far, some intense opposition from local communities.
Proposed data centers in Oldham, Simpson and Meade counties have been blocked this year, as locals have concerns about increased energy bills and potential noise, water or air pollution near their massive campuses.
Rep. Adam Moore, a Democrat from Lexington, intends to file a bill that would require data center companies to sign contracts pledging to cover most of the costs of increased power generation, in an effort to protect ratepayers.
While being supportive of new data centers, Republicans have also said they will file legislation intended to protect current ratepayers from higher bills, in addition to letting local communities have some control over what projects can go where in their cities and counties.
“I think the extent of maybe regulation around data centers is going to be more around giving communities the abilities and the tools that they need to make sure that they're making good decisions for themselves,” said Republican House Speaker David Osborne of Prospect.
Mandatory immigration enforcement
GOP Rep. TJ Roberts of Burlington said during the interim session he intends to file legislation that would require all Kentucky law enforcement agencies to enter into agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. These agreements, part of the 287(g) program, delegate some immigration enforcement to local agencies — a job typically the responsibility of the federal government.
Roberts said the program is an opportunity to “provide more resources to our law enforcement community, to promote public safety and to align us with the priorities of the federal government.”
A number of Kentucky agencies have already entered the agreements, although not in Kentucky’s most populous counties. According to ICE data, 14 sheriff’s offices and police departments in Kentucky have entered into the “Task Force Model” program that Roberts wants to require; it allows police to exercise immigration authority during the course of their regular duties, as opposed to a jail enforcement model that allows local officials to begin immigration enforcement against people who are already arrested.
When asked about Roberts’ bill, GOP Senate President Stivers said he thinks local police “should always cooperate with other law enforcement agencies when people are breaking the law.”
Task force recommendations on housing
Republican Sen. Robby Mills of Henderson said the General Assembly intends to advance several recommendations of the housing task force he co-chaired this year, focusing on deregulation and tax incentives in order to tackle the shortage of affordable housing.
“There's a lot of little bites at the apple that we're going to have to take,” Mills said, noting that this would take the form of several bills instead of one omnibus bill.
On regulatory reform, Mills says they’ll try to eliminate “outdated” state and local regulations that increase the costs of housing developers. Though the legislature passed a law in 2025 to discourage multi-family developments in Jefferson County, Mills says they will try to pass bills this session building on the task force recommendations to reduce lot sizes and encourage infill in urban areas.
Mills also expects incentivization bills that strengthen affordable housing trust funds, provide tax credits for rehabilitating housing and create a loan fund for residential infrastructure.
Medicaid and ‘MAHA’
Republican lawmakers frequently lament the exploding cost of Medicaid in Kentucky, which provides health insurance to one-third of people in the state. To suss out suspected fraud and inefficiencies in the system, lawmakers created the Medicaid Oversight and Advisory Board earlier this year to create recommendations for the upcoming session.
Since that board’s creation, Congress passed the tax and spending bill that is set to cut a trillion dollars from Medicaid over the next decade — health policy firm KFF estimates that will lead to a $22 billion decrease in federal Medicaid spending in Kentucky alone over that period. But many of those changes won’t go into effect for a couple of years, meaning it is unlikely to be directly addressed in this budget session.
The new Medicaid advisory board did recommend that the Beshear administration look into “solutions” for the upcoming changes that will make the biggest cuts to Medicaid, like the limits placed on state-directed payments. They also recommend requiring certain co-pays for Medicaid recipients, which is currently blocked by state law, and modernizing the eligibility process.
One of the other key suggestions is to provide the Legislative Research Commission unprecedented access to the Department of Medicaid Services internal systems to allow for auditing. It is unclear how much personal data, like personal medical files and hospital records, lawmakers foresee making available for LRC investigations. It also calls for the development of a “public, web-based transparency dashboard” to track Medicaid costs and performance.
Over in another new group, dubbed the “Make America Healthy Again Kentucky Task Force,” lawmakers have put together recommendations they say will improve the health of Kentuckians. The final memo calls for a new focus on functional medicine, a holistic approach to chronic illness management. It presses for more physical education requirements in high schools and stronger public health programs that reduce exposure to environmental toxins and emphasize nutrition and healthy lifestyles.
The MAHA policy recommendations also call for restricting federal food assistance spending to healthy foods, which would require a temporary waiver from the federal government. It also says the state should look for ways to make school meals healthier, including by supporting farm-to-school programs — the Trump administration nixed such a program earlier this year.
Guns, AirBNB and drivers licenses. Others bills to watch for
- GOP Rep. Savannah Maddox of Dry Ridge will file a bill to return the issuance of drivers licenses to county circuit clerk officers. This was transferred to regional Transportation Cabinet officers due to Real ID responsibilities, but Maddox says residents have to travel long distances and wait in long lines, while county offices could use the same third party services for Real ID that the state uses.
- Last session, GOP Sen. Aaron Reed from Shelbyville proposed a bill to make Kentucky’s gun laws even more permissive by allowing 18, 19 and 20-year-old Kentuckians to carry concealed firearms without a permit or training as other adults in the state can. At the time, a couple of Republicans expressed reservations about allowing even younger people to carry concealed guns without training. The bill had support from at least some GOP leadership, especially Senate President Stivers.
- Speaker Osborne advanced a measure through the House in 2025 that would restrict how local governments can regulate short term rentals, like AirBNB. The measure did not pass the Senate, but industry is still pushing for regulatory help.
- Last session, GOP senators attempted to place a ban on telework for state employees, with a few very limited exceptions. The goal was to increase accessibility and accountability of state workers, but it would also likely upend the lives of employees who had come to rely on that flexibility. Some Republicans were opposed to the measure and it did not gain any traction in the House; however, with Trump’s calls to end remote work for most federal workers, the legislation could make a renewed appearance next year.
