Nomination Fees and Deposits: How They Work, and When You Lose Them

Updated 2 October 2026.

Two bodies, the party and the IEBC, will ask you for money before your name reaches a ballot paper, and aspirants routinely treat the payments as one bill. They are not. They are set by different authorities, under different rules, with different answers to the only question that matters afterwards: does any of it come back.

Payment one: the party

A party sets its own charges. In practice there are usually two: a membership-related charge, and a nomination or expression of interest fee for the specific seat you want to contest.

This money goes to a private body, governed by that party's own rules, which are deposited with the Registrar of Political Parties. Read those rules before you pay, because they are the only document that tells you what happens if the primary is cancelled, if the seat is filled by consensus, or if the party decides to hand the ticket to a direct nominee.

Related: read the rules before the fee.

Party fees are typically the largest of the pre-ballot payments and the least regulated. They are also where reduced rates for women, youth and persons with disabilities have appeared in past fee schedules. Whether such rates apply this cycle, and at what level, is in the party's own published schedule, so ask for it in writing.

Payment two: the Commission

The IEBC charges a nomination fee, and that fee is set by regulation and published ahead of each election. It differs by seat, because the seats are not comparable.

Take the figure from the current gazette notice for this election. Any number you have heard quoted for a Kenyan nomination fee is either from a previous cycle or from somebody repeating a previous cycle, and fee schedules are revised.

You pay it, you get a receipt, and the receipt is part of your nomination file. An unreceipted payment is not a payment as far as the returning officer is concerned. Related: what else goes into the file.

Fee or deposit: the law has already chosen

Here is where the honest answer is a mechanism rather than a figure.

Electoral systems handle candidate money in two broad ways. A fee is a charge for processing a nomination and it does not come back. A deposit is money lodged against a condition, most commonly a minimum share of the vote, and it returns to candidates who meet the condition and is forfeited by those who do not.

Kenya uses the first. The Elections (General) Regulations, 2012 describe the IEBC payment for every seat, from MCA to President, as a non-refundable nomination fee, and they set no refundable deposit for candidates. Assuming the money comes back and then discovering it does not is a budgeting error that lands in the week after the election, when a campaign is least able to absorb it.

What this means for a campaign budget

Fees are not the expensive part of running for office in Kenya, and treating them as the headline number is how aspirants underestimate the whole exercise. The expensive parts are people, movement and the ground operation across the whole of your ward, constituency or county.

Related: what a campaign actually costs.

What fees do have is timing. They fall due at fixed points, they are not negotiable, and a campaign that has spent its early money on branding can find itself unable to pay a nomination fee that arrives on a date it does not control.

So put them in the budget as dated, ring-fenced lines, in a campaign bank account, before anything discretionary is committed.

Three rules that will save you money

Never pay a party fee before you have read that party's nomination rules for your seat and understood how the ticket can be awarded without a vote.

Never pay anything without a receipt in the name of the body receiving it. Cash handed to an official is a story, not a payment, and it is a story that ends with your name off a ballot.

Never budget on the assumption that money paid is money that returns. Check the notice, and if the notice says the payment is a fee, write it off in your plan on the day you pay it.

What to do this week

Request two documents: your party's current fee schedule for your seat, and the IEBC's published nomination fee schedule for this election. Put both figures into a dated line in your 2027 budget with the ring-fence noted beside them.

Then ask one question of whoever is holding the money: if this fee falls due tomorrow, can we pay it today. If the answer is no, the campaign has a sequencing problem that has nothing to do with fees and everything to do with how it is spending. Related: the route those payments sit inside.