Landlord Atlas

What must a Hawaii landlord disclose to a tenant, and what must the lease say?

Verified September 13, 2026 All Hawaii topics →

A Hawaii landlord must tell the tenant in writing, at or before the tenancy begins, who manages the building and who owns it, with an address for each, and must make a written move-in inventory of the premises and of any furnishings and appliances, signed by both sides with a copy to each tenant, before the tenant moves in.

Cited to Haw. Rev. Stat. § 521-8 (definitions) and 34 more cited sources · Verified September 13, 2026

An owner who lives out of state or on another island must name an on-island agent on the written lease, a copy of any written lease must be furnished to the tenant with no deadline stated, rent receipts are owed at the time of payment, and the landlord's general excise tax number must be given to every tenant. Beyond that Hawaii requires nothing: no tenant-rights statement, no lead, mold, bed-bug, radon, methamphetamine or asbestos disclosure, and no flood notice, because the state's flood, tsunami, sea-level-rise and airport-noise disclosures all run from a seller to a buyer. A missing inventory is not fined; it costs the landlord the benefit of the doubt, because the unit's condition at the end of the tenancy is then presumed to be what it was at the start. The disclosure duties share one remedy of one hundred dollars plus attorney fees after a ten-day demand, a landlord's fee clause is capped at twenty-five percent of the unpaid rent, and a landlord has no duty to disclose a death in the unit.

Hawaii lease disclosures at a glance

Which law governs Chapter 521 of the Hawaii Revised Statutes, the Residential Landlord-Tenant Code, carries every duty on this page: the identity disclosure and its posting alternative, the copy of the lease, the move-in inventory, rent receipts, the general excise tax number, the prohibited clauses, the attorney-fee limits, the conversion and demolition notices and the rule about disclosing a tenant's death. It applies to the rights, remedies and obligations of the parties to any residential rental agreement wherever made, of a dwelling unit within the state, subject to thirteen listed exclusions. Three other bodies of law sit beside it. Chapter 508D, the mandatory seller disclosures chapter, carries the flood, tsunami, sea level rise, airport noise and military air installation notices, and it reaches only a sale of residential real property, a term that includes a lease with an option to buy but not an ordinary lease. The statute of frauds is section 656-1, read with section 666-4, which validates oral leases of a year or less. And the county-powers chapter is where Hawaii authorizes its four counties to regulate renting, subletting and rental conditions by ordinance. Hazard law sits in the health title and the health department's rules and places no duty on a landlord.
Who is covered Statewide, and the code says so: it applies to any residential rental agreement wherever made, of a dwelling unit within the state. What varies is coverage rather than the content of a duty. Thirteen classes of occupancy are excluded unless the arrangement was created solely to avoid the code: residence at an institution incidental to detention or to medical, geriatric, educational, counseling or religious service; university or college housing, and a private dormitory management company offering fifty or more beds; occupancy under a bona fide contract of sale; residence in a fraternal organization; transient day-to-day occupancy in a hotel or motel; occupancy by an employee or pensioner conditional on employment, and for up to four years afterwards under a transfer plan; a lease of improved residential land for a term of fifteen years or more; occupancy by a prospective purchaser after an accepted offer; occupancy by a seller after transfer; homeless facilities under the human services chapter; federal low-rent public housing run by the state housing authority; transitional facilities for abused family or household members; and any structure or property directly controlled, owned or managed by that housing authority. No duty on this page has a unit-count threshold. One duty is scoped by where the owner lives rather than by the property: only an owner or landlord living outside the state, or on a different island from the unit, must name an on-island agent on the written lease. Separately, the state's flood and hazard-area notices reach only a sale of residential real property, which includes a lease with an option to buy.
Written lease, copy and signature rules

No statute requires a residential lease to be in writing beyond the statute of frauds, so an oral tenancy is lawful. The landlord must give the tenant a copy of the lease; the statute sets no day count.

No Hawaii statute requires a residential rental agreement to be in writing. The landlord and tenant may agree in writing to any period as the term, and in the absence of such an agreement the tenancy is month to month, or week to week for boarders; a rental agreement is defined to include all agreements, written or oral, that establish or modify the terms, conditions, rules or any other provisions about the use and occupancy of a dwelling unit and premises. A lease for more than one year must be written and signed to be enforceable, and an oral lease of a year or less is as good as a written one. Where the rental agreement is written, the landlord must furnish a copy of it to the tenant, and that is the whole of the duty: the chapter fixes no deadline, no delivery peg and no form, so the duty exists but the timing does not. Failing to furnish the copy is one of the disclosure failures that carries one hundred dollars plus reasonable attorney fees if it is not put right within ten days of the tenant's proper demand. Hawaii has no plain-language act reaching residential leases, no translation or language duty, and no type-size or placement rule.

Statute of frauds: Two sections set the line together. No action may be brought on a contract for the sale of land or of any interest in or concerning land, or on any agreement that is not to be performed within one year of its making, unless the agreement or a memorandum of it is in writing and signed by the party to be charged or by that party's written authorized agent (section 656-1). And, notwithstanding any law to the contrary, an oral lease of real property for any period not exceeding one year is valid and enforceable to all intents and purposes as if it were in writing (section 666-4). The working threshold for a residential lease is therefore more than one year.

Electronic leases and signatures: Hawaii's Uniform Electronic Transactions Act, chapter 489E, applies to a residential lease, so the lease itself may be signed and delivered electronically. The act does not apply to a transaction to the extent it is governed by a law or rule about notices of default, including notices relating to acceleration, repossession, eviction, foreclosure or the right to cure, or about utility shutoff, though it applies again where such a record is used for a transaction governed by another law. Chapter 521 itself carries no electronic-signature or electronic-mail provision: its only electronic references are the electronic filing of a nonpayment complaint and the mediation provisions.
Owner and agent identity

Yes — a statute requires the landlord to disclose the owner's or managing agent's identity to the tenant, in the lease, in a separate writing, by posting on the premises, or on the tenant's request.

A landlord, or anyone authorized to enter into a rental agreement on the landlord's behalf, must disclose to the tenant in writing at or before the tenancy begins the name and address of each person authorized to manage the premises, and the name and address of each person who owns the premises or is authorized to act for the owner for service of process and for receiving and receipting for rents, notices and demands. Only a name and an address are required; no telephone number. The information must be kept current and is enforceable against any successor landlord, owner or manager. Where the rental agreement is oral, the information must be supplied to the tenant on demand in a written statement. There is a posting alternative for multi-unit structures: in a multi-unit single-owner building with an elevator, a printed or typewritten notice must be placed and continuously maintained in every elevator and in one other conspicuous place; in one without an elevator, in at least two conspicuous places; and in any multi-unit structure, posted in a conspicuous place within the unit. A separate and stricter rule binds distant owners: an owner or landlord who lives outside the state, or on a different island from the unit, must designate on the written rental agreement an agent who lives on the same island as the unit to act on the owner's behalf. No threshold applies to any of this, and Hawaii has no statewide landlord or rental registration. Two consequences follow a failure. First, agency by operation of law: a person who does not comply becomes an agent of each landlord both for service of process and for receiving and receipting rents, notices and demands, and for performing the landlord's obligations under the chapter and the rental agreement, including spending or making available for that purpose all rent collected from the premises; a related provision estops a non-dealing owner and deems the dealing owner an agent of every other landlord for performing those obligations. Second, money: a landlord who does not comply with any disclosure requirement of section 521-43 within ten days after the tenant's proper demand is liable to the tenant for one hundred dollars plus reasonable attorney fees.
Required statements and lease text

No general statement or document is prescribed, but the statutes or rules fix some of what the lease must say, listed here.

Hawaii prescribes no tenant-rights statement, no summary of the landlord-tenant code, no pamphlet, no model lease and no words that a residential lease must carry. Nothing in the landlord-tenant chapter requires the landlord to hand over, attach or recite any statement, summary, brochure or agency form. The Office of Consumer Protection does publish a landlord-tenant handbook and links it from its own rules index, but no statute obliges a landlord to give it to anyone; the only publication duty the legislature has imposed on that office concerns application screening fees, and it is a duty on the office rather than on a landlord. Two things must nevertheless appear in a written rental agreement, and both are listed separately: the on-island agent an absent owner must designate, and, at the tenant's option, the representative a tenant may name to deal with personal property after the tenant's death. A third information duty exists but is not lease text and not a document: every landlord must give tenants the landlord's general excise tax number so the tenant can claim the low-income tax credit, a duty with no form, no timing and no threshold, described in the utility, fee and payment row.

Lease contents the statutes or rules address, each in the circumstance it names:

• An owner or landlord who lives outside the state, or on an island other than the one where the unit is located, must designate on the written rental agreement an agent residing on the same island as the unit to act on the owner's behalf (section 521-43, subsection (f)).

• A tenant may, as part of the rental agreement or in a separate written instrument, name a representative authorized to collect or dispose of the tenant's personal property in the unit if the tenant dies during the tenancy; this is the tenant's option and places no duty on the landlord (section 521-85, subsection (a)).
Move-in condition report

Yes — the landlord must give a written condition statement, checklist or inventory.

Hawaii is one of the few states where a move-in inventory is squarely the landlord's duty and does not depend on a deposit being taken. Before the initial date of initial occupancy the landlord must inventory the premises and make a written record detailing the condition of the premises and any furnishings or appliances provided. Duplicate copies must be signed by the landlord and by the tenant, and a copy given to each tenant, not one per unit. The duty sits in an unnumbered paragraph at the end of the landlord's fitness section rather than in a section of its own, and it is not in the deposit section. No agency prescribes a form; the landlord makes the record. The consequence is evidentiary and it cuts both ways. In an action under that section the executed copy of the inventory is presumed to be correct. If the landlord makes no inventory and written record, the condition of the premises and of any furnishings or appliances at the end of the tenancy is rebuttably presumed to be the same as when the tenant first moved in, which in practice defeats an unsupported damage claim; the state's intermediate appellate court applied exactly that presumption to reverse a damage award to landlords who had produced no inventory for an oral tenancy. There is no fine, no deposit forfeiture and no statutory damages figure for omitting it, and the hundred-dollar disclosure remedy does not reach it, because that remedy is keyed to the separate disclosure section. No threshold applies, and Hawaii gives no tenant a right to see a prior tenant's damage list.

When and who signs: Prior to the initial date of initial occupancy, that is, before the tenant moves in rather than within a period afterwards. Duplicate copies are signed by the landlord and by the tenant, and a copy goes to each tenant (section 521-42, subsection (a)).
Hazard disclosures

No in-force state hazard disclosure duty applies at signing beyond the federal lead-paint rule. No state duty exists for lead, mold, bed bugs, radon, methamphetamine, asbestos, or any other hazard.

Every state duty and every stated absence, hazard by hazard:

Lead (state add-on to the federal rule) — no state duty. Hawaii adds nothing to the federal lead-paint disclosure rule: no state form, no registration, no inspection certificate and no re-disclosure on renewal. The state's lead rules, adopted under the asbestos and lead statute, accredit training programs and certify the people and firms who carry out lead-based paint activities, and they say plainly that while the chapter sets requirements for performing such activities should they be undertaken, nothing in it requires an owner or occupant to undertake any particular lead-based paint activity.

Mold — no state duty. Hawaii has no mold law: no disclosure, no remediation standard, no licensing of mold contractors, no agency booklet and no rule in the health department's regulations. The word does not appear in the landlord-tenant chapter, in the seller-disclosure chapter, in any chapter or section heading of the health title, or in the titles of the department's rule chapters.

Bed bugs — no state duty. Hawaii has neither a bed-bug disclosure at signing nor a notice fired by an infestation during the tenancy. Bills in the 2025 and 2026 sessions would have barred renting a unit known to be infested and set procedures once an actual or suspected infestation was reported, but they were habitability measures rather than disclosure measures and they died with the session.

Radon — no state duty. The word radon appears nowhere in Hawaii's landlord-tenant chapter, its seller-disclosure chapter, the chapter and section headings of its health title, or the titles of the health department's rule chapters. There is no state radon program and nothing to disclose from.

Methamphetamine — no state duty. Hawaii regulates methamphetamine manufacturing sites, but nothing in that regime reaches a tenant and nothing bars renting a property that was one. The health department's decontamination and cleanup rules apply to any site in the state that has been used to manufacture methamphetamine, and their notice provisions run in one direction only: after the equipment and hazardous materials are removed, law enforcement must place a warning in a conspicuous location on the site telling potential visitors, licensees or trespassers that the site may pose a health hazard; the chief law enforcement officer must notify the property owner that the property was used as a manufacturing site; and the owner must then contact the department's emergency response office within seventy-two hours. There is no landlord-to-tenant disclosure anywhere in the rules, and no statute in the health title creates one.

Asbestos — no state duty. No Hawaii statute or rule requires an asbestos disclosure to a tenant. The state's asbestos law is an emission-control and hazard chapter, and its rules are abatement-practice, school-inspection, certification and fee regimes. Neither the statute nor the rules places any duty on a lessor, a landlord or an owner toward a tenant; the statute's only confidentiality provision binds department employees.

Other hazard notices (pesticide, ordnance, pool, cesspool, pest control) — no state duty. Hawaii requires no pesticide-application notice, no military ordnance or noise-zone notice to a tenant, no pool-safety notice, no cesspool notice and no pest-control-contract disclosure. The airport noise and military air installation notices that do exist run from a seller to a buyer. One provision sometimes mistaken for a hazard rule is the medical-cannabis clause, which voids a lease provision allowing eviction of a valid certificate holder; it is a void-clause rule, not a disclosure.
Flood disclosure

No.

Hawaii puts no flood disclosure on a residential landlord, and the word flood does not appear in the landlord-tenant chapter at all. The state's notification regime is broad but purchaser-facing: where residential real property lies within a federally designated special flood hazard area, within an airport noise exposure area mapped under the federal aviation rules, within the air installation compatible use zone of a military airport, within an anticipated inundation area on the state's tsunami inundation maps, or within the sea level rise exposure area designated by the state's climate commission, and subject to those areas being mapped by tax map key, the seller must include that material fact in the disclosure statement given to the buyer, along with a disclosure about shoreline erosion-control structures, with any ambiguity in the maps resolved in the seller's favor. That chapter applies to any sale of residential real property, defines a sale to include a lease with an option to buy, and forbids a seller to sell without delivering a signed disclosure statement, so an ordinary residential lease is outside it and a tenant receives none of those notices by state law. The only other flood provision in the code authorizes the counties and the tourism authority to take part in the federal flood insurance program and creates no private duty.
Disclosures about the property's situation Hawaii's location notices are termination notices rather than signing disclosures, and they belong to the lease-termination page; they are described here because a reader of this page will look for them. Where a landlord contemplates converting the property to a condominium property regime, the landlord must give the tenant notice at least one hundred twenty days before the rental agreement is terminated. The same one hundred twenty days applies before ending a month-to-month tenancy where the landlord contemplates voluntary demolition of the dwelling units, conversion to a condominium property regime, or changing the building's use to transient vacation rentals; that notice must be in writing, and if it is revoked and reissued the period starts again. On a good-faith sale to an unconnected buyer, the disclosure the statute speaks of runs to the buyer, not to the tenant: a landlord who discloses in writing in the contract for sale is relieved of liability for events after the conveyance, and the new owner takes on the obligations of the rental agreement. When the landlord's interest is transferred, the successor must give each tenant written notice of the deposit amount credited to that tenant within twenty days, failing which the tenant is presumed to have paid a deposit of at least one month's rent at the original rate. Hawaii requires no sex-offender registry notice, no military ordnance or noise-zone notice to a tenant, no foreclosure-status notice and no notice of a death in the unit; on that last point the statute says the opposite, and it is described below.
What need not be disclosed

Yes — the facts the rule names need not be disclosed.

A landlord has no obligation to disclose the death of a tenant, or the history of deaths of tenants in a rented unit, to a prospective tenant (section 521-85, subsection j). The statute states no duty rather than a bar; a separate provision keeps a tenant's own domestic-violence information confidential.
Utility, fee and payment disclosures Hawaii requires no utility disclosure of any kind at signing: no shared-meter or submetering statement, no ratio-billing disclosure, no fee itemization or total-price rule, no rent-concession disclosure, no renter's-insurance requirement, no smoking-policy disclosure and no rent-reporting notice. What it has instead are three payment rules and one tax duty. Receipts: the landlord must furnish the tenant a written receipt for rent paid at the time of payment; a canceled check also satisfies that requirement; and where the rent is paid by check the landlord must furnish a receipt if the tenant asks for one. Payment method: a landlord may not require the delivery of a postdated check or other negotiable instrument for payment of rent. Timing and place: rent is payable at the time and place the parties agree, and unless they agree otherwise the whole rent is payable at the beginning of a term of one month or less and in equal monthly installments at the beginning of each month for longer terms, with a separate option for a tenant on public assistance to move the due date, the one-time adjustment being the monthly rent divided by thirty and multiplied by the number of days between the old and the new due date. There is no separate duty to disclose where rent is to be paid. And one duty has no analog anywhere else in the country: a landlord must give the general excise tax number to all tenants so they can claim the low-income tax credit. That subsection states no writing requirement, no timing, no form and no threshold, and it has been on the books since 1988 at the latest. The receipt duty, the general excise tax number, the copy of the lease and the identity disclosures all share one remedy: one hundred dollars plus reasonable attorney fees if the landlord does not comply within ten days of the tenant's proper demand. Late charges are capped at eight percent of the rent due and are on the late-fee page; rent-increase notice periods are on the rent-increase page; the application screening fee, its receipt and cost breakdown on request and its thirty-day refund are on the application and screening-fee page; deposit caps, the fourteen-day return and the treble-damages remedy are on the deposits page.
Lease clauses that are void or prohibited

Yes — the statute lists the lease provisions that are void or prohibited.

Hawaii's prohibitions are a real list, but a distributed one: six operative provisions, each with its own formula, rather than a single roster. The general anti-waiver rule binds both sides, so neither a landlord nor a tenant may waive the code's rights or remedies, though the parties may settle a disputed claim in good faith and for less than the amount claimed, and a settlement involving a waiver falls if the court finds it was unconscionable when made, looking at competence, deception or coercion, whether legal advice was taken and the nature and value of what was given. One provision is a rewriting rule rather than a voiding rule: an instrument that hands landlord powers to someone other than the beneficial owner operates, whatever its terms say, to require that person to use the rents to meet the code and the maintenance laws, which is what makes the agency consequence of a missing identity disclosure bite. The rest void clauses outright: exculpation or indemnity for the landlord's own acts or omissions, a confession of judgment, an attorney-fee clause outside the statutory limits, and a clause allowing eviction of a medical-cannabis certificate holder, that last with two carve-outs that travel with it. Behind all of them sits a general unconscionability power: a court may refuse to enforce an unconscionable agreement, enforce the rest without the unconscionable provision, or limit the provision to avoid an unconscionable result, and an act or practice the chapter expressly permits is not by itself unconscionable.

Sanction as the statute states it: The clause is void or unenforceable and the lease survives. Nothing in the landlord-tenant code awards damages, a multiple of rent or anything else for including a prohibited clause, and there is no cure window. The chapter's money exposures sit elsewhere: one hundred dollars plus reasonable attorney fees where a disclosure is not put right within ten days of the tenant's demand, and treble the security deposit for a willful wrongful retention.

The listed provisions:

• Any waiver: except as the chapter otherwise provides, neither a tenant nor a landlord may waive or agree to forego rights or remedies under the landlord-tenant code, and a settlement in which a party waives rights is invalid if the court finds as a matter of law that it was unconscionable when made (section 521-31).

• Any agreement, conveyance or trust instrument authorizing someone other than the beneficial owner to act as landlord, which operates regardless of its terms to authorize and require that person to use the rents to comply with the code and with any other law, code, ordinance or regulation about maintaining and operating the premises (section 521-32).

• A provision exempting or limiting the landlord, or requiring the tenant to indemnify the landlord, from liability for damage to persons or property caused by or resulting from the acts or omissions of the landlord or the landlord's agents, servants or employees, in or about the unit or the premises of which it is part, which is void (section 521-33).

• An authorization by a tenant allowing any person to confess judgment on a claim arising out of a rental agreement, which is void (section 521-34).

• An attorney-fee provision outside the limits the code allows, which is unenforceable (section 521-35, subsection (c)).

• A provision allowing eviction of a tenant who holds a valid certificate for the medical use of cannabis in any form, which is void, unless the rental agreement allows eviction for smoking tobacco and the cannabis is used by smoking, and which does not apply where the governing documents of a condominium property regime or planned community association prohibit the medical use of cannabis (section 521-39).
Attorney-fee clauses

A landlord attorney-fee clause is lawful but capped.

Hawaii permits a landlord-favoring attorney-fee clause and caps it. A rental agreement may provide for the tenant to pay the costs of a suit for unpaid rent and reasonable attorney fees not in excess of twenty-five percent of the unpaid rent, after default and after referral to an attorney who is not a salaried employee of the landlord or the landlord's assignee. The cap is on the unpaid rent, not on a money judgment. The same section separately permits, without requiring, a clause awarding reasonable attorney fees and costs to the prevailing party in all other matters arising under the landlord-tenant code, and a provision that breaches the section is unenforceable. There is no reciprocity mechanism: nothing turns a one-way clause into a mutual covenant, and no statute awards fees to a prevailing tenant regardless of what the lease says. Statutory fees do run to a tenant in particular situations, including the hundred dollars plus reasonable attorney fees for a disclosure failure after demand, and in the retaliation, domestic-violence and mediation provisions; and in a small-claims action over a security deposit neither party may be represented by an attorney at all.
When, how, and what happens on a failure Timing pegs. At or before the tenancy begins: the written disclosure of the manager's and owner's names and addresses, or the posted notice that substitutes for it in a multi-unit building, with a written statement on demand where the agreement is oral. In the written lease itself: the on-island agent an absent owner must designate. Before the initial date of initial occupancy: the inventory of the premises and of any furnishings or appliances, signed by both parties with a copy to each tenant. Where the agreement is written: a copy of it to the tenant, with no deadline stated anywhere in the chapter. At the time of payment: a written rent receipt, which a canceled check satisfies, and which is owed on request where rent is paid by check. At no stated time: the general excise tax number. Within twenty days of a transfer of the landlord's interest: written notice to each tenant of the deposit amount credited. At least one hundred twenty days before termination: notice of a contemplated condominium conversion, and, for a month-to-month tenancy, of a contemplated demolition, conversion or change of use to transient vacation rentals, in writing, with the period restarting if the notice is reissued. The identity information must be kept current and binds successors. The only duty requiring a signature is the move-in inventory, which both parties sign. Remedies are concentrated in one place. A landlord who does not comply with any disclosure requirement of section 521-43 within ten days after the tenant's proper demand owes the tenant one hundred dollars plus reasonable attorney fees, and that single remedy covers the identity disclosure, the copy of the lease, the rent receipt, the resident-agent designation and the general excise tax number. Alongside it runs a structural consequence: a person who fails to make the identity disclosure becomes an agent of each landlord for service of process, for receiving and receipting rents, notices and demands, and for performing the landlord's obligations, including spending the rent collected on them. Everything outside that section states no penalty: the move-in inventory is evidentiary only, and the conversion and demolition notices carry no sanction in their sections. The consumer protection office may receive, investigate and attempt to resolve a dispute under the chapter, which is discretionary and not adjudicative; the chapter carries no cross-reference to the state's unfair and deceptive practices law, no bar on an eviction for a disclosure failure and no rent-withholding remedy for one. Finally, nothing in the chapter may be applied to interfere with a right, obligation, duty, requirement or remedy that is a condition of a federally subsidized program.
Can cities add their own rules Hawaii expressly authorizes its counties to legislate in this area. The county-powers statute gives each county the power to regulate the renting, subletting and rental conditions of property for places of abode by ordinance, and the grant is subject to the section's opening words, that each county has these powers subject to general law, so a county ordinance may add to the state code but may not contradict it. Hawaii has four chartered counties: Honolulu, Hawaii, Maui and Kauai. The landlord-tenant chapter itself carries no preemption or authorization clause; its scope section says only that the chapter applies to the rights, remedies and obligations of the parties to any residential rental agreement wherever made, of a dwelling unit within the state. Nothing in the county-powers chapter preempts a local lease-disclosure or lease-content ordinance, and the flood provision in that chapter merely authorizes counties to take part in the federal flood insurance program. No Hawaii city or county carries a lease-disclosure packet on this page.
How state law refers to the federal rules State law adds nothing to, and refers to nothing in, the federal rules, which are listed further down this page
Changes already signed into law No signed act is waiting beyond any not-yet-in-force duty already stated on this page
Leading court decisions Sasaki v. Morisako, 112 Haw. 302, 145 P.3d 845 (Hawaii Intermediate Court of Appeals; 2006; residential setting; bears on the move-in condition report): Landlords who had accepted rent and entered into an oral rental agreement failed to produce the inventory documenting the condition of the property at that time. The court held that under section 521-42(a) the condition of the property at the end of the oral rental agreement was presumed to be the same as when the tenants first occupied it, and because the landlords offered no evidence to rebut that presumption, the trial court's award to them for damage to the property was improper. The opinion also records the legislature's purpose for the inventory: to protect both landlord and tenant from false, inaccurate or misleading claims about the condition of the premises at the start of the tenancy.

Cite this page: "Landlord Atlas, Hawaii Lease Disclosure Laws & Required Lease Terms (verified September 13, 2026), landlordatlas.com/laws/lease-disclosures/hawaii/" — free to cite and quote with a link (how these records are verified). Everything above is cited in the citations section below.

Hawaii hazard disclosures at a glance

No row below is an in-force state duty to disclose, hand over, attach or post a hazard notice; the federal lead-paint rule still applies to housing built before 1978. Each row's full text, trigger, threshold and remedy are in the table above.

Hazard Status When Form Prescribed document
Lead (state add-on to the federal rule) None — — —
Mold None — — —
Bed bugs None — — —
Radon None — — —
Methamphetamine None — — —
Asbestos None — — —
Other hazard notices (pesticide, ordnance, pool, cesspool, pest control) None — — —

Federal rules that apply in every state

The federal layer for the lease-disclosures topic, carried once for the whole site. Every row names who it binds: most federal lease attachments bind only a landlord who takes a voucher or holds HUD-assisted or HUD-insured property, and the one rule that binds every landlord (the lead-paint disclosure rule) is a floor that state law may add to. No state record restates these rows; a state record says only where its own law references or extends them. Each row below says who it binds before it says what it requires. The full text of each row, with its citations, is on the 50-state page.

Notes and caveats

Common questions: Hawaii lease disclosures

Each answer is the verified value from the table above, restated as a direct answer. Free to quote with a link to this page.

Does Hawaii require a landlord to give the tenant a written statement of tenant rights?
No general statement or document is prescribed, but the statutes or rules fix some of what the lease must say, listed here. Hawaii prescribes no tenant-rights statement, no summary of the landlord-tenant code, no pamphlet, no model lease and no words that a residential lease must carry.
Does a Hawaii landlord have to disclose the owner's name and address?
Yes — a statute requires the landlord to disclose the owner's or managing agent's identity to the tenant, in the lease, in a separate writing, by posting on the premises, or on the tenant's request. A landlord, or anyone authorized to enter into a rental agreement on the landlord's behalf, must disclose to the tenant in writing at or before the tenancy begins the name and address of each person authorized to manage the premises, and the name and address of each person who owns the premises or is authorized to act for the owner for service of process and for receiving and receipting for rents, notices and demands.
Is a move-in inspection checklist required in Hawaii?
Yes — the landlord must give a written condition statement, checklist or inventory. Hawaii is one of the few states where a move-in inventory is squarely the landlord's duty and does not depend on a deposit being taken.
What hazards must a Hawaii landlord disclose to a tenant?
No in-force state hazard disclosure duty applies at signing beyond the federal lead-paint rule. No state duty exists for lead, mold, bed bugs, radon, methamphetamine, asbestos, or any other hazard.
Does Hawaii require flood disclosure to renters?
No. Hawaii puts no flood disclosure on a residential landlord, and the word flood does not appear in the landlord-tenant chapter at all. The state's notification regime is broad but purchaser-facing: where residential real property lies within a federally designated special flood hazard area, within an airport noise exposure area mapped under the federal aviation rules, within the air installation compatible use zone of a military airport, within an anticipated inundation area on the state's tsunami inundation maps, or within the sea level rise exposure area designated by the state's climate commission, and subject to those areas being mapped by tax map key, the seller must include that material fact in the disclosure statement given to the buyer, along with a disclosure about shoreline erosion-control structures, with any ambiguity in the maps resolved in the seller's favor.
Does Hawaii void or prohibit specific lease clauses?
Yes — the statute lists the lease provisions that are void or prohibited. Hawaii's prohibitions are a real list, but a distributed one: six operative provisions, each with its own formula, rather than a single roster.

Citations

How this record was verified: Direct reading of the Hawaii Revised Statutes on the Legislature's own current-text service. Chapter 521, the Residential Landlord-Tenant Code, was taken in full, all 62 files being 61 sections plus the chapter table of contents, and read section by section. The section pages carry no printed edition banner; the currency the host publishes is a directory stamp, and every file in the chapter directory was stamped January 5, 2026, with the volume index stamped January 6, 2026. The internal evidence agrees, since the newest credit line in the chapter is the 2025 act amending section 521-68 and that section was still published in its two-version form. Because that edition predates the 2026 regular session, which convened January 21, 2026, an enactment check was mandatory. It was run across three act surfaces on the Legislature's data service and reconciled: the acts roll, 265 rows with act numbers gap-free from 1 to 265; a second roll carrying the one measure that became law without the Governor's signature as act 266, which is absent from the first; and the veto roll, two rows. Those were then checked against the Legislative Reference Bureau's published list of the 268 bills passed in the 2026 regular session, which prints a sections-affected line for each of the 235 bills that touch existing law; the other 33 are appropriation or new-program bills and each of their subject lines was read individually. Searching that publication for the chapter numbers, for landlord and for rental agreement returns nothing touching either chapter on this page. Chapter 508D, the mandatory seller disclosures chapter, was read in full, all 26 files, for its scope clauses. Title 19, Health, was covered by taking all 84 chapter tables of contents and enumerating every section heading, since the host serves no full-text search reachable by a direct request; chapter 342P was then read in full. Sections 656-1, 666-4 and 489E-3 and chapters 46, 846E, 514B, 480, 467, 128D and 149A were read for the statute of frauds, oral leases, electronic transactions, county powers, sex-offender duties, condominiums, unfair and deceptive practices, real estate brokers and pesticides. For administrative rules, Hawaii publishes no consolidated code and no state-wide currency line, so the Department of Health's own index of its title 11 rules was enumerated: 113 chapters, each with its effective date in the index's own column. The lead, methamphetamine and asbestos chapters were then read, the methamphetamine chapter from the emergency response office's copy because the index copy is a defective scan whose pages are sixteen instances of one blank image. The consumer protection office's four rule chapters were enumerated and the advertising chapter read in full. Act 33 of the 2024 session laws, which added the death-of-a-tenant section, was read as enacted with its effective-date section. Pending measures were enumerated rather than guessed: both chambers' full measure reports for the two-year term, 2,453 House rows and 2,856 Senate rows, were taken and every row parsed for its last action, then filtered for landlord, rental agreement and the chapter number, giving 43 measures, each typed from its own last action against the Bureau's statement that the legislature adjourned sine die on May 8, 2026. Sasaki v. Morisako, 112 Haw. 302, 145 P.3d 845 (App. 2006), was read in full in the archived official reporter text, its metadata confirmed against the volume's own case list, and its subsequent history checked, which turned up one later decision applying it that carries a not-for-publication legend on its own face and is therefore recorded as a non-precedential follower rather than as authority. Verified September 13, 2026.

What was read to state each absence on this page: