Hawaii Short-Term Rental Regulations: A 2026 Guide For Airbnb Hosts

Do you own a place in Hawaii and you're weighing whether to put it on Airbnb or Vrbo? Well, the good news is that short-term renting is still legal somewhere on every one of the four counties. The less good news is that "somewhere" keeps getting smaller, and for the first time it's shrinking on an actual calendar rather than through scattered enforcement sweeps.

That shift is recent enough that a 2024 guide would already be wrong about it. Act 17, signed in May 2024, gave counties explicit authority to zone short-term rentals out of existence over time, and it was written specifically because a federal court had blocked part of Honolulu's earlier attempt to do exactly that. Maui didn't waste the authority. In December 2025 it signed Bill 9 into law, and that single ordinance puts an estimated 6,000-plus apartment-zoned vacation rentals on a countdown: West Maui properties have to stop by January 1, 2029, and everywhere else in the county by January 1, 2031. If you own or are eyeing a condo in Kihei, Lahaina or on Molokai, that date matters more than almost anything else in this guide.

So here's what we'll cover: what's still allowed on each island, what a license or registration costs where one exists, the tax layers that stack on every single stay regardless of county, how seriously the enforcement side is taken, and exactly who to call when your specific situation doesn't fit neatly into any of it. Every figure below traces to a county or state source, checked in July 2026, and where a county's own site blocked automated reading I've said so rather than guessing. If you're comparing a Hawaii property against a mainland market where the rules move less, run both through BNBCalc first.

What are Short-Term Rental (Airbnb, VRBO) Regulations in Hawaii?

Running the numbers through BNBCalc only answers half the question, because whether you're allowed to list at all depends entirely on which island and which zone your property sits in.

Hawaii itself sets no ceiling on how strict a county can be. Under HRS §46-4(a), as amended by Act 17, counties can regulate "the time, place, manner, and duration in which uses of land and structures may take place," which is the legal basis for everything from Honolulu's resort-zone restriction to Maui's phase-out. Two things apply no matter which county you're in, though: the General Excise Tax license and the Transient Accommodations Tax certificate. Neither one is a land-use permit, and neither one makes an otherwise-illegal rental legal. They're state tax registrations that sit on top of whatever your county allows.

Here's how the four counties differ in practice:

County	Where new listings are realistically allowed	Governing mechanism
Honolulu (Oahu)	Resort-zoned areas, plus a shrinking pool of pre-1986 grandfathered units	Ordinance 22-7 / Bill 41
Maui	Existing Short-Term Rental Home permits outside the phase-out zones	Bill 9 (2025), STRH permit process
Kauai	Visitor Destination Areas, plus grandfathered homestay and nonconforming TVR permits	County zoning ordinance (Transient Vacation Rentals)
Hawaii (Big Island)	Countywide, subject to new registration starting September 2026	Bill 47 / Ordinance 25-50

Notice that "countywide" only appears once, and even that comes with a registration requirement that didn't exist two years ago. Everywhere else, legality is a parcel-by-parcel question, not an island-wide yes.

Starting a Short-Term Rental Business in Hawaii

That table looks tidy on the page, but getting into this business is messier than picking a favorable county and buying there. Zoning maps in Hawaii are drawn parcel by parcel, so two condos in the same building can sit on opposite sides of the legal line depending on when each unit was last used as a rental and what the building's original zoning designation was.

On Maui specifically, that history matters enormously right now. Many of the units caught by Bill 9's phase-out are the same apartment-zoned condos, often called the "Minatoya list" buildings after the state attorney general opinion that first let them operate as vacation rentals decades ago. Assuming you're looking at a Maui condo, don't take a listing agent's word that it's a legal short-term rental. Make sure you confirm with the county's Planning Department whether the specific unit holds a Short-Term Rental Home permit, and if it does, whether it falls inside or outside the phase-out zone, because the permit itself won't survive the deadline either way.

Even where a county still welcomes new applications, expect the process to run for months rather than weeks. Honolulu isn't issuing new Nonconforming Use Certificates at all, so a Bed & Breakfast or Transient Vacation Unit registration there only works if your property is already zoned for it. Hawaii County's registration requirement is brand new, and Kauai and Maui both route non-grandfathered applications through a discretionary permitting process rather than an automatic one. None of that means the business doesn't exist. It means the entry point looks a lot more like a zoning application than a business registration, and that's the mindset to bring to it before you sign anything.

Short-Term Rental Licensing Requirement in Hawaii

Once you know your parcel is eligible, what you apply for differs by county, so it's worth walking through each one on its own terms.

Honolulu (Oahu)

Honolulu's Department of Planning and Permitting recognizes two categories: a Bed & Breakfast Home, where the host lives on-site and rents up to two rooms to a maximum of two adult guests each, and a Transient Vacation Unit, a whole-home rental. Both require registration, and both are limited to resort-zoned areas plus a small pool of Nonconforming Use Certificates issued to properties operating since before October 22, 1986. New NUCs are not being issued, full stop, so if your unit doesn't already have one and isn't in a resort zone, this path is closed to you. Existing NUC holders renew annually between September 1 and October 15, and starting August 1, 2026 that renewal moves onto the city's HNL Build portal. Watch out for that October 15 cutoff, because missing it lapses the registration automatically. DPP's current page doesn't publish an exact registration fee, and I couldn't confirm one on an official source, so check directly with DPP's Land Use Permits Division before budgeting for it. For the fuller Oahu picture, including how the eligibility map works street by street, our Honolulu County guide goes deeper.

Maui County

Outside the areas Bill 9 is phasing out, Maui issues Short-Term Rental Home (STRH) permits through the Planning Department, and the process is genuinely discretionary. The county's own application packet requires proof that every owner and lessee of record within 500 feet of the property has been notified, along with the notification letter and a list of who received it, and the Planning Commission holds a public hearing before deciding. Meeting every requirement on the checklist doesn't guarantee approval. If your target property sits in a district Bill 9 already covers, don't bother applying for a new STRH permit there at all. The clock is already running regardless.

Kauai

Kauai restricts transient vacation rentals to designated Visitor Destination Areas, and operating one outside a VDA without a permit is unlawful under the county's zoning ordinance. Grandfathered exceptions exist in two forms: a Homestay permit and a Nonconforming TVR (sometimes called TVNCU) permit, both of which recertify annually through the Planning Department. Kauai's own transient-vacation-rental page renders as a script-driven shell to automated readers, so I wasn't able to pull exact fee figures or the underlying ordinance number directly, and I'd treat any number you find secondhand as worth confirming with the Planning Department by phone before you rely on it.

Hawaii County (Big Island)

Hawaii County's rules are the newest of the four, since Bill 47, enacted as Ordinance 25-50 in July 2025, only just created a countywide registration requirement for every short-term vacation rental, hosted or unhosted, at $250 and $500 respectively. That registration platform, built with vendor Deckard Technologies, goes live September 1, 2026. A companion measure, Bill 175, would add a grace period from that launch date through December 31, 2026, waiving violation fees while owners get compliant. Since Bill 175 hadn't finished the council process as of my last check, don't assume the grace period is locked in; confirm its status with the Planning Department before you plan around it.

Required Documents for Hawaii Short-Term Rentals

Since every one of those four systems asks for something slightly different, it's worth building one document folder that covers the overlap before you touch a county-specific form.

Two things belong in it no matter where your property sits: your General Excise Tax license number from Form BB-1, and your Transient Accommodations Tax certificate of registration number. Both come from Hawaii Tax Online, and county applications routinely ask for both numbers as a prerequisite, so get them first rather than mid-application.

From there, the county-specific paperwork looks roughly like this:

• Honolulu: proof the unit already holds a Nonconforming Use Certificate, or proof of resort zoning; a site plan; and, for a Bed & Breakfast Home, evidence the applicant actually lives there.
• Maui: the STRH application itself, a site plan, proof of ownership, and the neighbor notification package: signed notices to every owner and lessee within 500 feet, plus the list of who was notified.
• Kauai: the homestay or nonconforming-TVR application, proof the property was operating before the applicable cutoff date, and annual recertification paperwork once approved.
• Hawaii County: the STVR application packet, a site drawing, a tax clearance certificate, and proof you have no delinquent property taxes, on top of your GET and TAT numbers.

Keep in mind that Maui and Honolulu both treat an incomplete or inaccurate submission as grounds to deny outright rather than asking you to fix it, so it's worth having a local land-use attorney or permit expediter review the package before it goes in, especially on Maui where a public hearing is involved.

Hawaii Short-Term Rental Taxes

Assuming your property clears the licensing hurdle and you're able to start hosting, there's still a genuinely stacked tax bill waiting on every booking. Three layers apply to essentially every Hawaii short-term rental, and because two different governments set them, they don't share a filing calendar.

Tax	Rate	Collected by
General Excise Tax (GET)	4% statewide, plus a 0.5% county surcharge in all four counties through 2030 (4.712% max combined pass-on)	State Department of Taxation
Transient Accommodations Tax (TAT), state	11%, effective January 1, 2026 through December 31, 2030	State Department of Taxation
County TAT add-on	Up to 3%, capped by HRS §237D-2.5	Individual county

Add those up and you're looking at a combined rate close to 19% of gross rental proceeds in a county that's adopted the full 3% add-on. That's not a small number to leave out of a pro forma, and it's precisely the kind of thing that turns an optimistic BNBCalc estimate into a disappointing bank statement if you forget to model it going in.

The state TAT rate itself moved recently, which is worth flagging since anyone quoting the old 10.25% figure is quoting last year's law. Act 96, passed in 2025, pushed it to 11% starting January 1, 2026, and it's locked in at that level through 2030 unless the legislature acts again. You file it through Hawaii Tax Online on Form TA-1, either yourself as the operator or through the booking agent handling the transaction, on a monthly, quarterly or semiannual schedule depending on how much tax you owe.

I couldn't confirm from any official state or county source whether Airbnb or Vrbo pays this on your behalf. DOTAX's own guidance states plainly that using a third-party rent collector or managing agent "does not relieve the property owner" of the GET and TAT filing obligation, which tells you where the state puts the responsibility even if a platform is also collecting something on the booking side. Don't assume you're covered just because a line item on your payout statement says "occupancy tax." Make sure you verify directly with whichever platform you use, and keep filing yourself until you've confirmed otherwise in writing.

Possible Deductions and Write-Offs

Rental income here is ordinary taxable income at the federal and state level, and the usual short-term rental deductions apply: mortgage interest, property management fees, cleaning costs, depreciation, and a share of utilities and insurance proportional to the time and space rented out. Where the math gets fiddlier is a hosted Bed & Breakfast situation, since you're only renting part of your own home, so keep separate records for the rented space rather than trying to apportion everything after the fact at tax time.

Does Hawaii Strictly Enforce STR Rules?

Yes, and the direction of travel over the last two years has been toward more enforcement, not less. Act 17 exists because a federal court blocked Honolulu from enforcing its 90-day minimum-stay rule, and rather than backing off, the legislature handed counties an even clearer mandate to regulate land use directly.

Honolulu's fines make that mandate concrete. Reading the ordinance text itself, operating an unregistered Transient Vacation Unit or Bed & Breakfast Home carries a civil fine of up to $10,000 for the initial violation, plus up to $10,000 per day for every day it continues after that. Booking platforms carry their own exposure too: a fine of between $1,000 and $10,000 per day for facilitating a stay at a property that isn't properly registered. That's the same enforcement logic New York City used to shut down its illegal Airbnb market almost overnight, applied to an island that already had a shrinking legal supply to begin with.

Maui's approach is different in mechanism but arguably harsher in outcome, since Bill 9 doesn't fine you into compliance, it simply ends the use on a fixed date regardless of how well you've behaved up to that point. West Maui operators lose the right to operate on January 1, 2029; everyone else in the county follows on January 1, 2031. There's no grandfathering past those dates, and no amount of good-faith compliance moves them.

Hawaii County's enforcement is still being built, quite literally. The new registration platform launches September 1, 2026, and the proposed grace period through the end of that year exists specifically because the county expects a wave of unregistered operators to need time to catch up. Once that window closes, expect enforcement to look a lot more like Honolulu's than like the light-touch approach that's existed on the Big Island up to now.

How to Start a Short-Term Rental Business in Hawaii

Assuming everything above still leaves you interested, work through these roughly in order, since the early steps decide whether the later ones matter at all.

1. Pick the county and the parcel before you pick the property. Zoning, not the listing description, decides whether short-term rental is even possible, so verify with the relevant Planning Department before you make an offer.
2. Check for a Bill 9 phase-out date if you're looking at Maui. A unit with a valid STRH permit today can still lose that right on a fixed calendar date. Ask specifically which zone the property sits in.
3. Register for GET and TAT through Hawaii Tax Online. Both apply everywhere in the state and both are prerequisites for county-level applications.
4. Submit your county application. Expect a site plan and proof of eligibility everywhere, neighbor notification and a public hearing on Maui, and a longer timeline than a typical business license anywhere in the state.
5. Assemble your tax and compliance documents in one place. GET number, TAT certificate, tax clearance where required, and any proof of ownership or occupancy your county asks for.
6. Set your pricing and cash flow assumptions around the roughly 19% combined tax load, not around the advertised nightly rate, before you commit to the purchase.
7. Don't forget to diarize every renewal date. Honolulu's NUC renewal window, Kauai's annual recertification, and any Hawaii County registration renewal all run on fixed calendars, and missing one can mean starting the whole process over.

Who to Contact in Hawaii about Short-Term Rental Regulations and Zoning?

Whichever step trips you up, one of five offices almost certainly owns the answer.

State taxes (GET and TAT)

The Hawaii Department of Taxation, Oahu District Office, handles GET and TAT registration and filing questions statewide.

• Address: 830 Punchbowl Street, Room 221, Honolulu, HI 96813-5094
• Phone: 808-587-4242
• Email: [email protected]
• Hours: Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. (8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. on the first Wednesday of the month)
• Online: Hawaii Tax Online

Honolulu (Oahu) zoning and STR registration

The Department of Planning and Permitting administers Ordinance 22-7 and the NUC/B&B/TVU registration system.

• Address: 650 South King Street, 7th Floor, Honolulu, HI 96813
• Phone: (808) 768-8000
• Email: [email protected]
• Online: honolulu.gov/dpp/permitting/str

Maui County zoning and STRH permits

The Maui County Planning Department handles STRH permits and can confirm whether a specific parcel falls inside a Bill 9 phase-out zone.

• Address: 2200 Main Street, Suite 619, Wailuku, HI 96793
• Phone: (808) 270-8205
• Hours: Monday through Friday, 7:45 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Kauai County zoning and TVR permits

The Kauai County Planning Department oversees Visitor Destination Area rules and homestay/nonconforming TVR permits.

• Address: 4444 Rice Street, Suite A473, Lihue, HI 96766
• Phone: (808) 241-4050
• Email: [email protected]
• Hours: Monday through Friday, 7:45 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Hawaii County (Big Island) STVR registration

The Hawaii County Planning Department, East Hawaii office, administers the new Bill 47 registration requirement.

• Address: East Hawaii Aupuni Center, 101 Pauahi Street, Suite 3, Hilo, HI 96720
• Phone: (808) 961-8288
• Email: [email protected]

What Do Airbnb Hosts in Hawaii on Reddit and Bigger Pockets Think about Local Regulations?

Since so much of this guide comes down to which county and which zone you're in, it's no surprise that host sentiment splits the same way. What follows is my read of the recurring themes in public discussion, not a formal survey, so weigh it accordingly.

• Maui buyers are the most rattled group right now. With Bill 9's deadlines set, the conversation among investors has shifted from "will this get regulated" to "how many years of cash flow do I actually have left," and that's a fundamentally different underwriting question than it was even in 2024.
• Big Island owners describe genuine confusion about the new registration system, mostly because it's so new that even people trying to comply in good faith aren't sure what the finished process will look like once the September 2026 platform goes live.
• Oahu hosts who already hold a Nonconforming Use Certificate tend to guard it carefully, since everyone in that conversation understands the certificate isn't reissuable if it lapses.
• Kauai comes up least often in these threads, likely because the Visitor Destination Area system has been stable for longer and doesn't generate the same sense of an approaching deadline.

Take the Maui thread seriously if you're underwriting a purchase there. A phase-out date isn't a risk you can price the way you'd price a fine, because it doesn't scale with how carefully you follow the rules in the meantime. It just arrives. If the numbers on a Maui condo only work assuming years of rental income past 2029 or 2031, run the shorter timeline through BNBCalc's Hawaii market data before you commit to anything.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you legally run an Airbnb in Hawaii in 2026?

It depends on which island and which zone. Hawaii has no statewide ban, but each of the four counties runs its own permitting system, and several restrict new short-term rentals to resort zones, Visitor Destination Areas, or grandfathered properties only. Maui is also phasing out apartment-zoned rentals by 2029 in West Maui and 2031 elsewhere. Check zoning at the specific parcel level before assuming a listing is legal, and register for the state's General Excise Tax and Transient Accommodations Tax regardless of which county you're in.

What is the Maui short-term rental phase-out and when does it take effect?

Bill 9, signed into law by Mayor Richard Bissen in December 2025, ends transient vacation rental use in apartment-zoned districts across Maui County. West Maui properties must stop operating by January 1, 2029, and properties everywhere else in the county, including South Maui, Hana and Molokai, must stop by January 1, 2031. The deadlines apply regardless of how compliant an individual operator has been, and there's no grandfathering past them.

How much tax does a Hawaii short-term rental owe?

Expect roughly 19% of gross rental proceeds in a county that has adopted the full add-on: 4% state General Excise Tax plus a 0.5% county surcharge, an 11% state Transient Accommodations Tax as of January 2026, and up to a 3% county TAT add-on. Both the GET license and TAT registration are required statewide regardless of which county you're in, and neither substitutes for a county land-use permit.

Does Hawaii require a short-term rental license?

There's no single statewide license. Honolulu registers properties as either a Bed & Breakfast Home or a Transient Vacation Unit; Maui issues Short-Term Rental Home permits outside its phase-out zones; Kauai limits rentals to Visitor Destination Areas plus grandfathered homestay and nonconforming permits; and Hawaii County is rolling out a new countywide registration requirement starting September 1, 2026. Every operator also needs the state's GET and TAT registrations on top of whichever county system applies.

What happens if you run an unregistered short-term rental in Honolulu?

Honolulu's ordinance allows a civil fine of up to $10,000 for the initial violation of the transient vacation unit or bed and breakfast rules, plus up to $10,000 for every additional day the violation continues. Booking platforms that process transactions for unregistered properties face their own fine of $1,000 to $10,000 per day. Since new Nonconforming Use Certificates aren't being issued at all, an unregistered whole-home rental outside a resort zone generally has no legal path to registration in the first place.

Last verified: July 2026. Every ordinance, tax rate, state law, and contact detail in this guide links to or comes from its official source.