The IEBC Has Gazetted the 2027 Campaign Finance Rules

Updated 2 October 2026.

The IEBC has gazetted the regulations governing campaign financing for the 2027 General Election.

The headline figures, from Gazette Notice No. 12251 of 7 August 2026: Sh6.11 billion for a presidential candidate, Sh24.45 billion combined for political parties, Sh15.43 million to Sh100.42 million for constituency seats, and Sh3.49 million to Sh22.1 million for a ward. Gubernatorial, senatorial and woman representative candidates in Turkana face a ceiling of Sh142.07 million, second only to Nairobi's Sh181.31 million.

Why the ceilings are the least interesting part

Because most campaigns will not approach them.

Research on the cost of politics in Kenya, by Karuti Kanyinga and Tom Mboya for WFD and NIMD (July 2021), put the average 2017 MCA campaign at Sh3.1 million and the average MP campaign at Sh18.2 million, well below the top bands. Small wards are the exception. Half the 1,450 wards are capped below about Sh5 million.

The requirement that will change behaviour

Every party, candidate and independent must establish a designated campaign bank account, and all contributions, donations and personal capital injections intended for political activities must be deposited there before being disbursed.

That is a structural change to how Kenyan campaigns have always operated, where the candidate's personal mobile money is frequently the treasury and cash arrives from people who prefer not to be listed.

Three consequences follow immediately.

A campaign needs a real treasurer, separate from the campaign manager, with a written approval threshold.

Every disbursement needs a purpose. "Facilitation" is not one.

The books have to exist continuously, not be reconstructed in July 2027 from a bank statement and a memory.

The framework's full scope

Worth reading past the caps. It covers contributions and expenditure, record-keeping, disclosure, reporting, auditing, monitoring, compliance and enforcement.

Most of that is paperwork, and most candidates will never come near a ceiling while being fully exposed on the paperwork.

Being realistic about enforcement

Kenya has had campaign spending rules before, and enforcement has been frustrated by legal challenges, late gazettement and institutional weakness. Analysts have written at length about how effectively unregulated Kenyan campaign finance has been in practice.

So the honest guidance is not that a regulator will audit you.

It is that the account requirement creates a paper trail whether or not anybody audits it, and that trail is what an election petition will reach for. Keep it clean because your opponent's lawyer will read it.

What to do this month

Open the account. Name the treasurer. Set the approval threshold in writing. Move existing spending onto the record.

Every month of delay is a month of spending that exists only in somebody's recollection, and reconstruction is what looks bad.

Related: setting up the account.

Contributions, and the question of who is giving

The framework covers contributions as well as spending, and the contribution side is where the more interesting information sits.

A record of who funded a campaign is a record of who has a claim on the person elected. That is the entire reason campaign finance disclosure exists anywhere, and it is why disclosure obligations are resisted more strenuously than spending caps.

For a candidate, the practical instruction is to treat contributions as seriously as expenditure: record who gave, how much, when, and in what form — including in-kind support such as a donated venue, printing at cost or fuel from a supporter's station, all of which carry a value.

A campaign that can produce that record has nothing to explain. One that cannot will be asked to explain it at the least convenient moment.

The date to work from

Spending counts against the limits from the start of the expenditure period, which regulation 4 of the new regulations sets at least six months before the election. That is well before campaigns formally begin in mid-2027.

A campaign that starts its records in June 2027 will have a year of activity outside them, and reconstruction is what looks worse than any number.