Rental Property in Hawaii: What the Numbers Actually Look Like

Hawaii holds two national records that both flatter it, and both are wrong in the same way: the number you are shown has had something removed from it.

The cheapest headline homeowners premium in the United States — $1,125 a year at $300,000 of dwelling coverage. It is cheap because a standard Hawaii homeowners policy excludes hurricane damage entirely. Not a carve-out deductible; a peril the policy does not cover. Buying it back costs roughly $500 to $2,500 a year on a separate policy or endorsement.

The lowest effective property tax rate in the United States — 0.27%. It is low partly because the counties grant owner-occupants a home exemption of $50,000 to $260,000. A rental gets none of it, in any of the four counties.

If you take one thing from this article: in Hawaii, neither headline number describes what a landlord pays. Both need to be rebuilt from the specific property before you can say anything useful about the deal.

A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in Hawaii. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Hawaii layers several taxes on rental activity that are outside this article's scope — the general excise tax on rental income, and a transient accommodations tax with county surcharges on short-term stays. Those rates are not in our data and are not guessed at here. Talk to a Hawaii CPA about them, a licensed Hawaii insurance agent about a real quote, and a Hawaii real estate attorney about anything contractual.

1. What a rental costs to buy here

Start with an honest warning about the price itself. Hawaii's statewide median is more disputed than any other state's in this dataset, and it is not a small disagreement:

• Redfin: $747,660 (June 2026, down 0.31% year over year) — a transaction-weighted, cross-state-comparable median, and the figure this article uses.
• Hawaii REALTORS: $535,000 for statewide single-family in July 2026 (condo $838,750). The association itself attributes the low figure to a "Total" methodology aggregating all four counties without weighting by sales volume, on a sample of 183 statewide single-family sales.
• Honolulu Board of REALTORS: $1,224,500 for Oahu single-family alone in July 2026, up 13.9% year over year — and Oahu holds roughly 70% of the state's population.
• Secondary aggregators cite a "Hawaii State" figure of $1,045,000 for July 2026 with unclear methodology.

That is a 2.3x spread. Which number you use changes the answer more than any expense line in this article. The statewide median is not a useful planning figure in Hawaii; the island and the neighborhood are.

County detail:

• Honolulu County (Oahu): $1,224,500, effective property tax rate 0.28%, standardized average insurance $616
• Hawaii County (Big Island): $590,000, effective property tax rate 0.28%

The cash you actually need

The conveyance tax is tiered, and being a landlord puts you in the higher tier. Hawaii's state conveyance tax (HRS Chapter 247) is marginal, like an income tax bracket, and the bracket schedule depends on whether the buyer qualifies for the county owner-occupant home exemption:

• Owner-occupant buyers: 0.10% on the portion of price under $600,000, rising to 1.00% on the portion over $10,000,000.
• Non-owner-occupant buyers — which includes every rental purchase: 0.15% rising to 1.25% across the same brackets.

The seller customarily pays it, by strong and near-universal local convention. So this is not usually a line on your settlement statement. It is, however, a real cost your purchase imposes on the transaction, and in a negotiation that matters. Our data records 0.2% as a representative owner-occupant rate near the median price; the actual tax is computed bracket by bracket at the higher non-owner tier.

Two related mechanics: Hawaii has no mortgage or intangible recording tax — mortgages and deeds of trust are expressly exempt from the conveyance tax, confirmed rather than assumed. And HARPTA imposes state withholding obligations on non-resident sellers, which will be your problem on the way out rather than on the way in.

• Closing costs: 2% to 4% with financing (escrow fees, title insurance, appraisal and inspection, recording, tax prorations), per Hawaii brokerage guidance. This article uses 3%. Note that Rocket Mortgage's much narrower 0.62% figure is a lender-fee-only measure that excludes the prepaids and escrow reserves most buyers actually fund.

On the $747,660 Redfin statewide median at 25% down:

• Down payment: $747,660 x 0.25 = $186,915
• Loan amount: $560,745
• Closing costs: $747,660 x 3% = $22,429.80
• Total cash in: $209,344.80

On price growth, FHFA's purchase-only index has Hawaii at +2.18% year over year through Q1 2026, ranked 30th of 51.

2. The two expenses that decide whether it works

Property tax: the lowest rate in the country, measured on someone else's house

SmartAsset and WalletHub both put Hawaii's effective property tax rate at 0.27%, the lowest in the nation. The Tax Foundation reads 0.29%. Sources cluster tightly at 0.27% to 0.29%.

On the $747,660 example: $747,660 x 0.27% = $2,018.68 a year, or $168.22 a month. That is 4.7% of gross rent — the lightest property tax line of any state in this series.

Now read the fine print, because it is the whole point. Hawaii has no single state-level homestead exemption. Each of the four counties independently administers its own owner-occupant "home exemption" against county real property tax, and the amounts are large:

• Honolulu (Oahu): $120,000 under 65, $160,000 at 65+
• Maui County: up to $200,000 at 60+
• Hawaii County (Big Island): tiered from $50,000 under 60 up to $110,000 at 75+
• Kauai County: $240,000 at 60-69, $260,000 at 70+

Every one of them requires owner-occupancy. A rental gets none of it. The 0.27% effective rate is a measurement of what owner-occupants pay after those exemptions come off. It is not what a landlord pays.

There is a second layer. Honolulu's published FY2025-2026 owner-occupied residential rate is $3.50 per $1,000 of net taxable assessed value — 0.35% on assessed value, which is what produces a roughly 0.28% effective rate on market value once the exemption is applied. Hawaii counties assess different property classes at different rates, and a non-owner-occupied residential property is not in the owner-occupant class.

Our data does not carry the non-owner-occupied rate for any Hawaii county, and this article will not invent one. What it will tell you is the shape of the answer: your rate class is different, your exemption is zero, and the tax figure in Section 3 below is therefore a floor rather than an estimate. Pull the actual classification schedule from the county's real property assessment office for the specific parcel before you underwrite anything.

Insurance: the cheapest headline in the country, for a reason you must not ignore

The reference figure is $1,125 a year at $300,000 of dwelling coverage with a $1,000 all-perils deductible. That is the average of two sources that disagree sharply — Insurance.com at $738 (which would make Hawaii the cheapest state in the country outright) and Insurify at $1,512. The midpoint is independently corroborated: Insurify's own Hawaii hurricane guide states that standard Hawaii homeowners coverage runs about $1,150 a year at $300,000 of dwelling coverage, within $25 of the average.

Every one of those numbers is for a policy that does not cover hurricane damage.

This is not a technicality and it is not a deductible structure. The Insurance Information Institute lists Hawaii among the nineteen states plus D.C. with hurricane deductibles and notes that most Hawaii homeowners insurers provide all-perils property and liability coverage but exclude hurricane, requiring a separate purchase. The Hawaii DCCA Insurance Division's own hurricane-season guidance urges residents to check whether they carry separate hurricane coverage at all.

Buying it back costs roughly $500 to just under $2,500 a year, depending on island and location.

Here is what that does to the deal. Take the identical house at the identical rent and change only the insurance line:

A landlord who budgets off the headline overstates the cap rate by up to 0.34 percentage points and understates the monthly loss by up to $208.34 — on a line item that does not appear on the quote they were given.

And notice where the buyback puts Hawaii nationally. At the high end, $3,625 is more than double Alaska's $1,418, Maine's $1,302, and Vermont's $1,013, and it is well above Idaho's $2,076. The cheapest headline in America can become a top-quartile real premium once the hurricane is put back in.

Two further exclusions a mainland reader will not expect. Standard Hawaii policies also exclude lava and volcanic eruption, earthquake, and tsunami. And on the Big Island, homes in Lava Zones 1 and 2 — parts of Puna near Kilauea's active vents — are routinely refused by standard carriers outright. If you are buying on Hawaii Island, the lava zone is a hard eligibility gate, not a pricing factor.

The hurricane deductible, and why it is a landlord's problem specifically

The separate hurricane policy carries its own percentage deductible, published at 1% to 10% of the dwelling limit and most commonly 1% to 5%. Our data records 2% as a representative middle selection, and states plainly that this is a midpoint of a published range rather than a measured Hawaii mode.

On a $300,000 dwelling limit:

• 1% = $3,000
• 2% = $6,000
• 3% = $9,000
• 5% = $15,000
• 10% = $30,000

Now put those against the property. Section 3, run with hurricane coverage bought back at $1,500, produces $26,805.92 of net operating income in a good year:

• A 1% deductible is 11% of a full year's NOI
• A 2% deductible is 22% of a full year's NOI
• A 5% deductible is 56% of a full year's NOI
• A 10% deductible is 112% of a full year's NOI

You cannot pass any of it to a tenant. It is not a lease obligation, it is not billable, and it does not wait for rent to accumulate. Meanwhile the property is likely uninhabitable, so rent stops at the same moment the deductible comes due — which is exactly what loss-of-rents coverage exists for, and exactly why you should confirm you have it, on which policy, and how many months it pays.

That last point is Hawaii-specific and easy to miss. You have two policies, and they answer separately. A question like "does my roof settle at replacement cost?" has to be asked twice — once of the base policy and once of the hurricane policy — and the two can give different answers with different deductibles.

The rebuild cost, and the cap that collides with it

Hawaii's construction cost is $330 per square foot — the highest figure in this dataset, within the widest band in it, $215 to $450. That is a 2.1x spread inside one state, and if any state's rebuild cost deserves to be treated as a range rather than a number, it is this one.

At $330 per square foot:

• A 1,500 square foot house costs about $495,000 to rebuild
• An 1,800 square foot house costs about $594,000
• A 2,000 square foot house costs about $660,000

Now the collision. The Hawaii Property Insurance Association — the state's FAIR plan and insurer of last resort — caps dwelling coverage at $450,000. At $330 per square foot, that limit fully covers a house of about 1,364 square feet and no more. HPIA offers deductibles of $500, $1,000, $2,000, or $3,000 and applications must come through a licensed property and casualty agent; it is not state-funded, and its premiums are among the highest in the state.

So the backstop in the state with the highest rebuild cost in the country is capped below what it costs to rebuild much of the housing stock. If HPIA is where your property ends up, you are underinsured by construction, not by choice.

One adjacent development worth knowing: the Hawaii Hurricane Relief Fund, dormant since the early 2000s, was reactivated in 2025 under Act 296 alongside expanded HPIA powers, in response to a condominium insurance crisis in which associations saw one-year premium increases of 300% to 600%. As of April 3, 2026, HHRF had taken 311 hurricane-coverage submissions and issued 97 policies — roughly $2.7 million in premium, all to condominium associations. It is a market-stabilization backstop aimed at that segment, not a general single-family option today. If you are buying a Hawaii condo, the association's insurance is a much larger question than your own.

On trend: Insurify projects -2% for Hawaii in 2026, one of the few states in that report showing a decline while the national figure rises 4%. A flat-to-negative single-family trend and a 300%-to-600% condo crisis are both true at once.

3. A full worked example

The property. A single-family house at the Redfin statewide median of $747,660 — with Section 1's warning attached: this is a contested figure, and an Oahu buyer should re-run everything at $1,224,500.

The rent — read this carefully. This site does not carry rent data. The $3,600 a month used below is an assumption chosen to be plausible for a house at that price. It is not a market observation. Pull three to five real comparable listings for the specific neighborhood and substitute the actual number.

The other assumptions:

• Vacancy: 8% of gross rent
• Property management: 10% of collected rent
• Repairs and maintenance: 5% of gross scheduled rent
• Capital reserve: 5% of gross scheduled rent
• Insurance: the $1,125 headline, so the arithmetic is transparent — the hurricane buyback is added explicitly afterwards
• Property tax at the 0.27% owner-occupied effective rate, which Section 2 explains is a floor for a rental, not an estimate
• Financing: 25% down, 30-year fixed at 7.00% — an assumption, not a quote
• Fee simple, no HOA, no condo association, and no leasehold. All four assumptions are load-bearing in Hawaii; see Section 7

Step 1 — income

• Gross scheduled rent: $3,600 x 12 = $43,200
• Vacancy loss: $43,200 x 8% = $3,456
• Effective gross income: $43,200 - $3,456 = $39,744

Step 2 — operating expenses

Management is charged on rent actually collected, not scheduled rent:

• Management: $39,744 x 10% = $3,974.40
• Property tax: $747,660 x 0.27% = $2,018.68
• Insurance: $1,125
• Maintenance: $43,200 x 5% = $2,160
• Capital reserve: $43,200 x 5% = $2,160
• Total operating expenses: $11,438.08

Expense ratio: $11,438.08 / $39,744 = 28.78% of collected rent — well below the 35% to 55% band most rentals land in. That is a warning, not a result. Two of the five lines above are understated by construction: the tax line has no exemption removed because the reference rate already assumes one, and the insurance line does not cover hurricane.

Step 3 — net operating income and cap rate

• NOI = $39,744 - $11,438.08 = $28,305.92
• Cap rate = $28,305.92 / $747,660 = 3.79%

The mortgage is deliberately absent from that figure. Cap rate exists to compare properties independently of how they are financed; putting debt service into it is the most common error in this whole exercise, and it makes two identical houses look like different investments because one buyer put more down.

Step 4 — debt service and cash flow

Loan: $747,660 x 75% = $560,745. At 7.00% over 30 years, principal and interest is $3,730.65 a month, or $44,767.80 a year.

• Annual cash flow = $28,305.92 - $44,767.80 = -$16,461.88
• Monthly cash flow = -$1,371.82
• Debt service coverage ratio = $28,305.92 / $44,767.80 = 0.63

Step 5 — cash-on-cash return

• Cash invested: $209,344.80 (Section 1)
• Cash-on-cash = -$16,461.88 / $209,344.80 = -7.86%

Step 6 — now add the hurricane coverage

Everything above uses the headline premium. Add a $1,500 hurricane buyback and nothing else changes:

• Insurance: $1,125 + $1,500 = $2,625
• Total operating expenses: $12,938.08
• NOI: $26,805.92
• Cap rate: 3.59% (down 0.20 points)
• Monthly cash flow: -$1,496.82 (down $125.00)
• Cash-on-cash: -8.58%
• DSCR: 0.60

That is the honest version. The 3.79% is what the quote shows you; the 3.59% is what you own.

Rate sensitivity, since 7.00% was an assumption

Using the headline premium so the comparison is clean:

• At 6.50%: P&I $3,544.29/mo, annual cash flow -$14,225.56
• At 7.00%: P&I $3,730.65/mo, annual cash flow -$16,461.88
• At 7.50%: P&I $3,920.81/mo, annual cash flow -$18,743.80

A full point of rate is worth about $4,518.24 a year — far more than every operating expense in Section 2 combined. On a $560,745 loan, the rate is the biggest single number in the analysis.

The simplest version of the same finding

Add up the four bills a lender escrows, with hurricane coverage included:

• Principal and interest: $3,730.65
• Property tax: $2,018.68 / 12 = $168.22
• Insurance: $2,625 / 12 = $218.75
• Total: $4,117.62 a month

Against $3,600 of assumed rent, that is -$517.62 a month before vacancy, management, or a single repair.

Run the same check off the headline premium instead and you get $3,992.62 and -$392.62. Same house. $125 a month cheaper. Wrong.

4. The expenses people leave out

Vacancy, management, and capital reserves do not arrive as invoices. Nobody bills you for the month the house sits empty, or for the roof you will need in nine years, or — if you self-manage — for your own weekends. So they fall out of the mental model, and the property looks better than it is.

Here is the same house with those three removed and everything else identical (headline premium throughout, so only the omissions move):

The three omissions are worth $9,590.40 a year — $3,456 of vacancy, $3,974.40 of management, $2,160 of reserve. They flatter the cap rate by 1.28 percentage points and hide 58% of the annual loss.

And look at the left-hand expense ratio: 12.28%. A single-family rental does not have a 12% expense ratio. Any time an analysis produces a number that far below the 35% to 55% band, the answer is not "great property" — it is "missing inputs."

Vacancy. Eight percent is roughly one month a year, which is what a single clean turnover costs between move-out and the next tenant's first full month. Setting it to zero assumes the house is never empty, including between tenants. Hawaii's tenant pool has some structural churn a mainland analysis will not anticipate — military rotations, seasonal and hospitality employment, and mainland relocations that reverse.

Management. Set it to zero and the return is paying you for your own labor rather than for the property. Self-managing this house saves $3,974.40 a year, lifting NOI to $32,280.32 and the cap rate to 4.32%, with cash flow improving to -$1,040.62 a month and DSCR to 0.72. It is the largest self-management saving in this series, because Hawaii's rents are the highest — and it is also the hardest to do from off-island.

Capital reserves. Roofs, HVAC, water heaters, and flooring have known lives, and Hawaii shortens several of them: intense UV exposure, salt air, and wind-driven rain are hard on roofs, and carriers here underwrite roof condition heavily, sometimes requiring reinforcement or replacement before they will write an older home at all. The 5%-of-rent convention used above is one option. A harsher and equally common convention is 1% of purchase price a year for maintenance and 1% for capital, which here is $7,476.60 each. Run that way: total operating expenses $22,071.28, expense ratio 55.53%, NOI $17,672.72, cap rate 2.36%, cash flow -$2,257.92 a month, DSCR 0.39.

That last convention deserves a defence in Hawaii specifically. A reserve set as a percentage of rent is a reserve sized to income. A reserve set as a percentage of price is a reserve sized to the building. In a state where the rebuild cost is $330 per square foot — the highest in the dataset — sizing the reserve to the building is the more defensible choice, and it produces a 2.36% cap rate rather than a 3.79% one.

So the honest cap-rate range for this property is 2.36% to 3.79% on the headline premium, and lower once hurricane coverage is in. Choose a convention deliberately.

What would actually have to be true

The rent this property needs. For cash flow to reach zero at this price and this financing, gross scheduled rent must reach about $65,812.44 a year, or $5,484.37 a month — 0.73% of purchase price per month. That is the lowest breakeven in this series, and it is entirely because Hawaii's tax and insurance headlines are so light. The assumed $3,600 rent is 0.48% of price, or 66% of what the property needs.

The price this rent supports. Hold rent at $3,600 and solve for the price at which cash flow reaches zero with 25% down: about $484,595, roughly 65% of the Redfin statewide median — and about 40% of the Oahu median.

The down payment this price needs. Keep the $747,660 price and the $3,600 rent and solve for the loan the NOI can service: about $354,550 — which means roughly $393,111 down, or 53% of the price.

5. What actually varies by county here

Hawaii's four counties are four different markets, and the property tax rate is the one thing that barely varies between them: Honolulu and Hawaii County both read 0.28% effective. Price is where the divergence lives, and price drives the loan, which drives everything.

Run each county at its own median, its own rate, and its own realistic rent, with hurricane coverage bought back:

Honolulu's insurance uses its own standardized county average of $616 plus the same $1,500 buyback, which is why its total premium is lower than the neighbor islands' even at more than double the price.

Oahu is the worst deal on this table and it is not close. The cap rate is nearly a full point below Hawaii County's and the monthly loss is roughly three times larger. The reason is arithmetic: Oahu's median is 2.08 times Hawaii County's while the assumed rent is only 1.5 times larger. Rent does not scale with price in Hawaii, and leverage punishes that gap hard.

Two further facts to check for a specific address, neither of which is in a county average:

Lava zone, on the Big Island. Zones 1 and 2 are an insurability gate, not a discount. Check it before the offer.

Leasehold versus fee simple. Hawaii has a genuine leasehold market with a complex conveyance history, and a leasehold property's economics are not the economics modelled anywhere in this article. If the listing says leasehold, everything above needs rebuilding around the lease terms and the remaining term.

6. Financing a rental is not financing a home

These are the standard mechanisms across the mortgage market. Any specific rate or overlay is your lender's, not this article's.

Down payment. Conventional financing on a non-owner-occupied one-unit property generally requires more equity than an owner-occupied purchase — 20% is usually the floor and 25% the common expectation, which is why this article models 25%. FHA and VA are not available for a property you do not occupy. The genuine exception is house hacking: a two-to-four-unit property you live in one unit of qualifies for owner-occupied programs.

Hawaii's conforming loan limit is the national maximum. Every Hawaii county — Honolulu, Hawaii, Maui, Kauai, and Kalawao — is an FHFA-designated high-cost area and shares a one-unit ceiling of $1,249,125, which is 150% of the $832,750 national baseline, up from $1,209,750 in 2025. That matters enormously here: at the Oahu median of $1,224,500, a 25%-down purchase borrows $918,375 and stays comfortably conforming. Note this is a different program from FHA, whose 2026 Honolulu County limit is much lower at roughly $828,000 and whose Hawaii County limit is roughly $586,500.

HHFDC and HHOC programs will not help you here. The Hale Kamaaina Mortgage Program and HHOC Mortgage's down payment assistance both require the borrower to occupy the property as a primary residence, and both are first-time-buyer gated. They are relevant to house hacking; they are not available for a pure rental.

Rate. Investment-property loans price above owner-occupied loans. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac apply loan-level price adjustments for investment occupancy that scale with loan-to-value and credit score; lenders pass those through as rate or points. The 7.00% modeled above is an assumption, and Section 3 shows a point of rate is worth $4,518 a year here. Get a real quote and shop it hard.

Reserves. Lenders typically require post-closing reserves — months of principal, interest, taxes, and insurance held in liquid assets — scaling with the number of financed properties you own. In Hawaii you want those reserves regardless of the lender's requirement, because Section 2's hurricane deductible is a five-figure cash event that arrives at the same moment rent stops.

Rental income counting. Lenders credit a portion of market or lease rent toward qualifying, not all of it. Ask what percentage yours uses and whether they need an appraiser's rent schedule.

DSCR loans. A debt service coverage ratio loan qualifies the property rather than the borrower, comparing property income to debt service and largely skipping personal income documentation. The trade is a higher rate, a larger down payment, frequent prepayment penalties, and a minimum DSCR — commonly stated at or above 1.0 and often above 1.2.

Look at Section 3. This property's DSCR is 0.63 on the headline premium, 0.60 with hurricane coverage, and 0.85 even with vacancy, management, and reserves stripped out. It does not qualify at 75% loan-to-value. The DSCR underwriting is telling you the same thing the cash flow line is.

Insurance is a closing condition, and in Hawaii it can be a deal-killer. Two policies must both bind, an older roof can make a house unwritable, and a Lava Zone 1 or 2 address may have no admitted market at all. Get bindable quotes for the specific address during your inspection period. Not after.

7. What to check before you buy in this state

Insurance, first, and twice.

1. Get a bindable landlord policy quote for the specific address — a dwelling fire form with loss-of-rents coverage, not a homeowners quote and not a statewide average.
2. Get a separate hurricane quote. Confirm in writing whether the base policy covers hurricane at all. Assume it does not until someone shows you otherwise.
3. Read the hurricane deductible off that second quote and multiply it into dollars against the dwelling limit. Section 2's range is $3,000 to $30,000 on $300,000. Write the number down; it is your minimum cash reserve.
4. Confirm loss of rents coverage, on which policy, and how many months it pays.
5. Ask the roof question twice — once of each policy. Replacement cost or actual cash value, and what roof age triggers a change.
6. Check whether lava, earthquake, and tsunami are excluded, and price any coverage you want for them separately.
7. On Hawaii Island, confirm the lava zone. Zones 1 and 2 are routinely refused by standard carriers.
8. Confirm the dwelling limit against replacement cost, not purchase price. At $330 per square foot, a 1,500 square foot house is near $495,000 to rebuild — above the HPIA cap of $450,000.
9. Get a flood quote separately, whatever the flood map says. No property policy anywhere covers flood.

Property tax, from the county rather than the average.

1. Get the county's classification schedule and confirm which class a non-owner-occupied residential property falls into. The 0.27% statewide effective rate does not apply to you.
2. Confirm the seller's home exemption and that it comes off when you buy. Exemptions run $50,000 to $260,000 depending on county and age.
3. Recompute the tax from market value with no exemption and the correct class rate, not from the seller's bill.

The price and the rent, from the market.

1. Ignore the statewide median. Use the island and neighborhood figure. Section 1 shows the statewide reads spanning $535,000 to $1,224,500.
2. Pull three to five genuine comparable rentals for the specific neighborhood and note how long they sat.
3. Divide monthly rent by purchase price. Section 4's breakeven for this example was 0.73%. Section 5 shows Oahu fails this test far worse than the neighbor islands.

Structure and title.

1. Confirm fee simple versus leasehold before anything else. Leasehold changes the entire analysis.
2. If it is a condo, read the association's reserve study, its insurance declarations, and two years of minutes. Hawaii condo associations saw one-year premium increases of 300% to 600%, which is what prompted Act 296.

The law and the tax treatment, from the source rather than from an article.

1. Do not take eviction timelines, notice periods, security-deposit handling, or late-fee rules from a blog — including this one. Hawaii residential tenancies are governed by the Hawaii Residential Landlord-Tenant Code, HRS Chapter 521. Read it at the Legislature's own site, https://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/, or have a Hawaii real estate attorney walk you through it.
2. Check the county separately: short-term rental restrictions in particular are aggressive and actively litigated across Hawaii's counties, and a property's permitted use is a county question.
3. Ask a Hawaii CPA about the general excise tax on rental income, the transient accommodations tax if any part of the use is short-term, and HARPTA withholding when you eventually sell. None of those rates are in our data, and none of them are guessed at above — but all three are real and all three change the answer.

What to do next

Every figure above came from a data file or was computed in front of you. Re-run all of it with your own numbers — and in Hawaii, more than anywhere, with your own island's numbers.

The Hawaii rental analysis calculator does exactly the work in Sections 3 and 4 — enter your price, your real local rent, and your own vacancy, management, and reserve assumptions, and it produces NOI, cap rate, cash flow, cash-on-cash, and DSCR. It also warns you when you have left out the expenses Section 4 is about, rather than letting them pass silently.

Because the published premium here is missing a peril, start with the Hawaii insurance premium estimator — it will get you closer to a real figure for a specific dwelling limit than the $1,125 statewide headline, and it converts the 1%, 2%, 5%, and 10% hurricane deductibles into actual dollars rather than leaving them as percentages.

The Hawaii mortgage payment calculator gives you the principal and interest figure for the rate you are actually quoted, which Section 3 shows is worth about $4,518 a year per point — the single largest lever in a Hawaii analysis.

This article is general educational information about rental property arithmetic in Hawaii, based on figures current as of August 2026. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice. The rent figures in the worked examples are stated assumptions, not market data. The property tax figures use the statewide owner-occupied effective rate and are a floor for a rental, not an estimate. Insurance premiums, property tax assessments, and mortgage rates change and vary by property. Consult a Hawaii CPA, a licensed Hawaii insurance agent, and a Hawaii real estate attorney before buying.