2026-09-10 · Hawaii · Regulation

Maui County has fixed the dates on which roughly 7,000 apartment-zoned vacation rentals stop being lawful. Mayor Richard Bissen signed Ordinance No. 5909, from Bill 9 (2025), on December 15, 2025, the same day the Council gave it final reading.¹

The two dates

• West Maui Community Plan area — amortization ends December 31, 2028; transient vacation rental use must cease January 1, 2029.
• The rest of the county — amortization ends December 31, 2030; use must cease January 1, 2031.

No opt-outs and no renewals.

The scale

The Minatoya list covers 7,069 properties — 6,823 units on Maui and 246 on Molokai. About 6,208 were actively operating as short-term rentals as of May 2024. The County expects more than 6,000 units to return to long-term residential use. Mayor Bissen put the ownership picture bluntly: “94% of the units affected are owned by people who don’t live in Maui County.”

The state-law hook

The county’s authority to amortize this use comes from HRS § 46-4(a) as amended by Act 17 (2024), which added to the zoning power “[t]he time, place, manner, and duration in which uses of land and structures may take place,” and provided that “uses that include the furnishing or offering of transient accommodations shall not be considered residential or agricultural uses and may be phased out or amortized in any zoning district by county zoning regulations.”

Before that amendment, § 46-4(a) barred counties from amortizing nonconforming residential uses. Act 17 removed transient accommodations from that shelter.

1. County of Maui, “Mayor Richard Bissen signs historic Bill 9 into law after Maui County Council vote today” (December 15, 2025) ↩
2. Maui County Council, Bill 9 (2025) overview ↩
3. Hawai‘i Public Radio, “Maui County passes historic law to phase out thousands of vacation rentals,” December 16, 2025 ↩
4. Session Laws of Hawaii 2024 (county zoning authority context) ↩