Hawaii's records law is the Uniform Information Practices Act, chapter 92F of the Hawaii Revised Statutes, and its working detail lives in chapter 2-71 of the Hawaii Administrative Rules, titled agency procedures and fees for processing government record requests. The Office of Information Practices, which administers both, publishes a quick guide to those rules explaining that they set the procedures, time limits and fees for every request. They bind all executive and legislative agencies of the State and of all counties, and apply to the administrative functions of the Judiciary, whenever an agency receives a request to view or copy a government record.
The Office recommends submitting a formal request on its model form, Request to Access a Government Record, which is published for download. It is equally clear about what the Office itself is not: it does not maintain other agencies' records, so a requester must go to the agency believed to hold them, and the Office's role begins where an agency denies a request or fails to respond. For Hawaii records held locally, see the Hawaii county pages.
- Ten business days: a fully disclosable record is released, or a written notice sent where the record is only partly public.
- Five business days after notice: the public portions follow within five business days of the notice or of any prepayment.
- Thirty dollars free, sixty in the public interest: the agency must waive the first thirty dollars of fees, or sixty where it finds a public interest, one waiver per request.
- Twenty business days to act: a requester who does not meet the notice's requirements in that time is presumed to have abandoned the request.
Written by SearchSystems.net from Hawaii's own systems: the Hawaii Office of Information Practices on the Uniform Information Practices Act, the Office's quick guide to its administrative rules, the Office's rules pages, the Notice to Requester form, revised April 2026, the Office's records request training materials, each read on October 15, 2026 by the SearchSystems editorial team.
Three timetables, depending on the record
The rules set out what must happen and when, in a table a requester can hold an agency to. Where the record is fully disclosable, the agency discloses it in full within ten business days of receiving the request. Where the record is only partly public, the agency must provide a written Notice to Requester within ten business days, and then disclose the public portions within five business days after giving that notice or after receiving any required prepayment.
Where extenuating circumstances exist, three steps follow: a written acknowledgement within ten business days of the request, a written notice within twenty business days, and disclosure of the public portion five business days after the notice or the prepayment. Where the records are voluminous, the agency may disclose incrementally, with the first increment within five business days of the notice or prepayment and each later increment within twenty business days of the one before, or of each incremental prepayment.
What each notice has to say
The rules prescribe the content of three different notices. A notice of access must state the method of disclosure, whether by email, post or collection, the estimated amount of fees to process the request, the amount of that estimate the requester must prepay with payment instructions, and, for incremental disclosures, how each later increment will be disclosed and what type of extenuating circumstance applies. A notice of denial must state whether all or part of the record is being withheld and must give the specific legal authorities supporting the denial, which on the published form means listing the records or information withheld, the applicable statutes and the agency's justification side by side.
A notice that the agency is unable to disclose must give the reason, the three examples in the rules being that the agency needs a further description or clarification, that it does not maintain the record, or that answering would require it to create a summary or compilation from records that are not readily retrievable. Where a record is partly confidential, the agency must segregate the confidential parts before releasing the rest, and its notice must tell the requester what is being withheld and how the public parts will be made available.
The fees, and the waiver that cancels most of them
For a public record request, the agency is authorised to charge for searching for, reviewing and segregating records, and it may do so even where the record is later found not to exist or is not disclosed in its entirety. The published rates are two dollars fifty for each fifteen minute period of search and five dollars for each fifteen minute period of review and segregation, which works out at ten dollars an hour of searching and twenty an hour of review.
Against that sits the waiver: the agency must waive the first thirty dollars in fees assessed for general requesters, or in the alternative the first sixty dollars where it finds the request is made in the public interest, and only one waiver is given for each request. For a modest request those figures often cancel the fee entirely, which is why the public interest ground, set out in the rules and on the model request form, is worth claiming in writing when it applies.
Copying and delivery are costs rather than fees, charged at the statutory per page rate and postage, and they are not covered by the waiver.
Personal records are different
A request for one's own personal record falls under Part III of chapter 92F rather than Part II, and the money rules change with it. For a personal record request the agency may charge for its costs only, meaning copying and delivery, and the fee waivers do not apply because no search, review and segregation fees are charged in the first place. That distinction is worth stating in a request, since asking for records about yourself under Part III avoids the hourly charges that apply to a public record request about the business of government.
Prepayment, and the twenty day abandonment rule
An agency may require prepayment of fifty per cent of the total estimated fees and one hundred per cent of the total estimated costs before processing a request, and where prepayment is required it may wait to start searching or reviewing until the money arrives. If a requester has outstanding fees or costs from earlier requests, including abandoned ones, the agency may require that balance to be paid in full first. The deadline that matters most to a requester is on the notice itself: if the requirements of the notice are not met within twenty business days after its postmark or email date, or after the date the agency makes the records available, the request is presumed abandoned and the agency has no further duty to process it.
A requester who has had second thoughts should say so promptly, because once processing has begun they may be liable for the fees already incurred.
Where the Office of Information Practices comes in
The Office does not hold other agencies' records and cannot retrieve them, but it is the place to go where an agency denies a written request, fails to respond, or where there is any other question about compliance with the Act. It publishes the model request form, the Notice to Requester and Acknowledgement to Requester forms agencies are expected to use, training materials on open records, and its opinions, and it takes enquiries by telephone, email and post from its office in the Capitol District building in Honolulu.
Because the agency forms and the timetable come from the same source, a Hawaii requester can usually tell at a glance whether a response is compliant: the right form, inside the right number of business days, with the fee estimate and the waiver shown on its face.
Questions about public records requests in Hawaii
Related Hawaii records
Hawaii's other public records guides on this site are the Hawaii background check guide for the Criminal Justice Data Center, the Hawaii court records guide for the judiciary's eCourt Kokua search, the Hawaii arrest records guide for what a booking makes public, and the Hawaii county pages for every county office.