The Communications Authority of Kenya has published draft procedural and technical safeguards for the deactivation and recycling of inactive mobile numbers. Public comments on the memoranda are open until 11 September at numbering@ca.go.ke.

The draft proposes two things:

A telco can put your number in the queue once it has recorded no revenue-generating activity on it for three months. Revenue-generating activity means a call made or received, an SMS sent or received, data used, airtime topped up, or a value-added service used. Once the number is flagged, the operator has to try to reach you on the contact details it took at registration, and keep trying for another three months.
Thirty days before that second window closes, it has to publish the list of numbers about to go, on its website and in the press. So it will take at least six months, from your last chargeable action to a stranger getting your number.

Under the current rules operators work with, a line is treated as inactive after 90 days.

The draft is set to take effect on 19 September 2026.

How we got here:

Back in March of this year, Justice LN Mugambi delivered a judgment at the High Court in Milimani in Odhiambo & another v Attorney General & another, Petition E290 of 2024. He held that a registered mobile number is a digital identifier protected by Article 31(c) and (d) of the constitution, gave the state six months to write rules, and set out what happens if it does not. His words: “at the expiry of the 6th month, in particular, the midnight of 19/9/2026, the reassignment and/or recycling of deactivated previous registered mobile numbers shall automatically cease.” We wrote about the judgment here and published how to read the full 42 pages of the judgement.

The petitioners, Erastus Ngura Odhiambo and Dickson Mwangi Muenene, were in prison. You cannot top up a line from a cell, and their lines went off for inactivity that was never a choice. The proposed draft answers such scenarios directly. It whitelists numbers belonging to people incarcerated for six months or more and people otherwise indisposed for up to a year. Everyone a USSD code, *106#, to check whether a number is on the list.

What you should actually do

Kenya had 84.1 million active mobile subscriptions at the end of March 2026 against roughly 53 million people, a penetration rate of 157.7%, after a record 5.7 million SIMs were added in a single quarter on the back of win-back offers. That is the pressure the Authority is managing.

If you keep a line for M-Pesa, a bank OTP, a KRA PIN or a tracker, six months can be quite a small window. Safaricom’s Daima keeps a line alive without topping up, at KES 200 for six months, KES 500 for a year and KES 1,000 for two, with 20 minutes and 20 SMS a month, on *100*4#. We’ve not seen an offering like this from competing telcos.