Automatic milking systems (AMS) record a wide range of information each milking, including whether a cow kicks the teat cup off during milking. The objectives of this study were to determine the heritability of kicking behavior and to determine the genetic correlation between 305d milk yield and kicking behavior. Ancestry, kicking behavior, and milk yield were collected from a dairy farm with 8 AMS. Kicking behavior was collected from 452 cows across 170,368 individual milkings, whereas 305d milk yield was available for 6532 total lactations from 2472 cows. Kickoffs (1 = teat cup kicked off at least once; 0 = otherwise) were determined for each quarter during each milking and across all 4 quarters. The frequency of kickoffs for each quarter was 2.1%, 2.6%, 5.3%, and 5.2% for the left front, right front, left rear and right rear quarters, respectively. The frequency across all quarters was 10.7%. A threshold animal model was used to evaluate kickoffs in ASReml, and multiple trait linear animal models were used to determine genetic correlations among quarters and between kickoffs and milk yield. The kickoff models included significant (P < 0.05) fixed effects of lactation (1, 2, and ≥ 3), number of times a cow was milked that day, hour of day milked, and month. Random effects included animal, permanent environment, the interaction of robot and date, the interaction of days in milk and lactation group, and error. First lactation cows were more likely to have kickoffs, and morning was associated with fewer kickoffs than evening. The heritability of kickoffs across quarters was 0.07 ± 0.05 and the repeatability was 0.37 ± 0.02. Across the individual quarters, the heritability of kickoffs ranged between 0.00 and 0.071. The genetic correlation of kickoffs among quarters ranged from 0.19 to 1.00. The heritability of milk yield was 0.29 ± 0.04 and the genetic correlation between milk yield and kickoff was estimated to be 0.20 ± 0.24. This study suggests that there is likely sufficient genetic variation to select for cows that are less likely to kick during milking in an AMS and that kicking behavior is likely to have strong genetic correlations across quarters.