What the Roster Actually Pays

Isaac Aluochier, S.Arb, S.Adj, Arbitral Fellow, CPM · Aluochier Dispute Resolution · July 2026

Read Article 1(3) beside Article 260 and a real asymmetry appears. Article 260 defines “State office” exhaustively — President, Deputy President, Cabinet Secretaries, Members of Parliament, Judges and Magistrates, members of county executive committees, governors and their deputies, members of county assemblies, and a handful of named senior offices besides. Five of the six categories of delegate through whom the people exercise their sovereign power under Article 1(3) sit somewhere on that list. Independent tribunals do not. Unless Parliament someday designates the office by legislation under Article 260(q), an AITAR Roster member is not a State officer, draws no salary fixed by the Salaries and Remuneration Commission, and has no line item in any national or county budget.

So the question a serious prospective applicant should ask is not rhetorical. If I join, what status do I actually have? If no public budget funds this work, what are my realistic financial prospects? How many appointments can I expect in year one — and what does a genuine full-time income look like by year two? This piece answers those questions with numbers, not reassurance.

The absence from Article 260 is real, and it cuts one way that matters and one way that helps. It cuts against you in status: no SRC-set salary, no constitutional security of remuneration of the kind Article 151 gives the President and Deputy President, no automatic pension architecture of the kind built for judicial officers.

It cuts in your favour in a way rarely mentioned. Article 77(1) provides that a full-time State officer shall not participate in any other gainful employment — the precise reason judges and magistrates are paid a separate Non-Practice Allowance to compensate them for being locked out of private practice. An AITAR Roster member is not bound by Article 77. You can build a Roster caseload alongside an existing practice, a teaching post, a directorship, or any other lawful work, without constitutional restriction. The absence of State office status is not purely a loss; it is also the removal of a constraint every one of the five other delegate categories lives under.

The correct description of the AITAR/AISTAR financial model is not “unfunded.” It is self-funded, on the same logic as private legal or arbitral practice: the disputants who use the tribunal pay the fee that supports it, set against a published fee schedule rather than negotiated case by case. What follows is not a promise about what you personally will earn — no professional practice can promise that — but a transparent, assumption-stated model of what the AISTAR caseload alone can realistically produce, built from Kenya's own published fee minimums and the scale of unmet demand already documented in ADR's market analysis.

AISTAR's minimum tribunal fee for a low-value, uncontested estate is KES 30,000. A Roster member who completes one such estate per working day — accounting for weekends and holidays, roughly twenty per month — generates a gross monthly figure of KES 600,000, or approximately KES 7.2 million annually. At an indicative exchange rate of about KES 130 to the US dollar, that is roughly USD 4,600 per month, or USD 55,200 per year.

This is a floor, not a ceiling, and a base-tier one at that. It uses only the minimum fee for the simplest, least valuable, uncontested category of estate. Higher-value estates, contested matters handled at Tier B, and appointments under AITAR's own commercial and civil fee schedules all sit above this figure. On ADR's own published modelling, the same daily discipline applied to contested matters at the Tier B minimum of KES 45,000 produces roughly KES 900,000 per month — a figure that exceeds a High Court judge's gross package. The KES 600,000 figure in this piece is deliberately the conservative case, not the aspirational one.

The scale of demand behind this model is not speculative. Kenya has an estimated backlog of dormant, unadministered estates numbering in the millions. More than 13,000 succession matters are reportedly pending in Nairobi courts alone. Roughly 27% of Kenya's unresolved land disputes are succession-related. The state currently holds more than KES 30 billion in unclaimed assets tied to estates that were never formally settled. A caseload of twenty completed low-value estates a month is a small fraction of one Roster member's share of that backlog — not an optimistic assumption about how much work exists.

In ADR's own professional judgement, a realistic ramp to the full twenty-matter monthly caseload is one to two years — not an overnight arrival. The first months of Roster membership are spent building the things a fee-for-service practice always needs first: visibility in the ADR Registry, a referral network among advocates and county-level intermediaries, and the practical fluency that comes only from handling real matters. Treat the KES 600,000 figure as the target you are working toward across that first year or two, not the income you should expect from month one.

Once reached, that base caseload becomes a floor for what comes next rather than a ceiling. A Roster member who has built the referral relationships and reputation to sustain twenty low-value estates a month is, by the same token, positioned to take on higher-value and contested AISTAR matters, and in time AITAR commercial and civil appointments — each priced well above the minimum-fee floor this model is built on.

However the constitutional status question resolves, the practical question — how does this income compare to the offices the Constitution did designate as State offices — has a clear, checkable answer, using the Salaries and Remuneration Commission's own published gross monthly figures.

The base-tier AISTAR target sits above every County Assembly office in this table and above entry-level judicial officers, and lands between a County Executive Committee Member and a Deputy Governor — without an election, without surviving the Judicial Service Commission's competitive appointment process, without a fixed retirement age, and without Article 77's bar on other gainful employment. It is, on realistic modelling, a genuinely comparable income to a meaningful share of Kenya's own State offices, reached by a route none of those offices offer: appointment, not election or political survival.

The same USD 55,200 annual target reads differently depending on where in the world you are standing. Set against IMF World Economic Outlook (April 2026) projections for GDP per capita — the standard measure of average economic output per person — the picture is stark.

At USD 55,200 a year, the base-tier AISTAR target is roughly 3.5 times the world's nominal average income per person, and more than twenty times the nominal average across Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa specifically — the regions most AITAR Roster applicants will actually be living and spending in. It sits below the North American, Australian, and European averages, but above every other regional average on the table, including the Middle East, South America, and Asia-Pacific combined.

There is a further point worth making carefully, because it is easy to overstate. Nominal figures compare what an income converts to on a currency exchange screen; PPP figures adjust for what it actually buys where you live and spend it. Africa's PPP-to-nominal ratio in the table above is roughly 3.5 to 1 — meaning income earned and spent locally on the continent buys considerably more than its raw dollar value suggests. Applying that regional ratio only as an illustrative guide, not a Kenya-specific calculation, an income of USD 55,200 earned and spent within Kenya carries local purchasing power meaningfully closer to the world's upper-middle income bracket than the nominal figure alone implies. This is a real effect, not a rhetorical one — but it is an approximation, not a Kenya-specific PPP figure, and should be read as such.

No, an AITAR Roster member is not a State officer under Article 260. No, there is no government budget line funding the role, and no SRC salary scale attached to it. Those are real, structural facts, and this piece has not tried to talk around them.

What sits alongside those facts is equally real. A conservative, minimum-fee, base-tier model of AISTAR caseload alone — built from Kenya's own documented backlog of dormant estates, not from optimistic assumptions — produces an income that compares favourably with a meaningful share of Kenya's actual State offices, and multiples of the average income across most of the world outside a handful of wealthy regions. It requires building a practice, the way any fee-based profession does, over a realistic one-to-two-year ramp rather than arriving on appointment. It is not a public salary. It is, on the numbers, a genuine one.