Hawaii Tenant Screening Laws: The Landlord and Applicant Guide

Hawaii tenant screening sits at the crossroads of federal and state law: the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act, which governs how a consumer report may be pulled and used everywhere in the country, and Hawaii’s own rules, most importantly the Act 200 screening-fee law at Hawaii Revised Statutes section 521-46, which since May 1, 2024 limits the fee to the landlord’s actual cost, and Act 310, which since May 1, 2023 protects Housing Choice Voucher holders as a source of income. The Hawaii landlords who screen properly almost never face a lawsuit. The ones who skip the consent form, overcharge the screening fee, or skip the adverse action notice pay for that shortcut, and the mandatory attorney-fee provisions are what make the bill so large.

This guide walks the whole framework in plain English: the four federal Fair Credit Reporting Act requirements every landlord must meet, Hawaii’s actual-cost screening-fee rule and thirty-day refund under section 521-46, source-of-income protection for voucher holders under Act 310 and section 368F-2, the protected classes under Hawaii’s chapter 515 fair housing law, the 24 CFR 100.500 disparate-impact rule for criminal history, the rights every applicant holds, a day-by-day screening workflow, a compliance playbook, real scenarios, and a Hawaii-specific set of frequently asked questions.

Because Hawaii layers state protections on top of the federal baseline, the safest posture for a landlord is written consent, a screening fee kept to actual cost, consistent written criteria, and proper adverse action notices every single time, and the strongest position for an applicant is to know exactly which rights the law confers. Treat every figure and rule here as a starting point and verify the current statute before you screen, charge a fee, or dispute a decision.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act, codified at fifteen U.S.C. section 1681, is the federal statute that governs tenant screening nationwide, and a Hawaii landlord must comply with it regardless of any state-law differences, then add Hawaii’s own rules under Hawaii Revised Statutes section 521-46 and the fair housing chapter 515. Getting both layers right prevents almost all screening-related liability. Four federal requirements sit at the core, and each one is load-bearing.

Permissible Purpose

A landlord has a permissible purpose under Fair Credit Reporting Act section 604(a)(3)(F)(i), fifteen U.S.C. section 1681b(a)(3)(F)(i), to pull a consumer report on a rental applicant: a legitimate business need in connection with a business transaction the consumer initiated. A lease renewal or a review of an existing tenancy sits in the neighboring clause (F)(ii). That is the threshold right to obtain the report at all, but it does not eliminate any of the other requirements — it only opens the door to a report the landlord must then handle correctly.

Applicant Authorization

Take the applicant’s signed authorization before pulling a consumer report, and keep it. Every consumer reporting agency requires the landlord to certify a permissible purpose and to hold the applicant’s written authorization before it will release a report, so the signed form is both a condition of the landlord’s user agreement with the agency and the evidence that the applicant initiated the transaction under section 604(a)(3)(F)(i). The authorization should be clear and conspicuous, and the best practice is a standalone form rather than a clause buried in the rental application. One attribution point is worth getting right, because most landlord guidance gets it wrong: the Fair Credit Reporting Act’s stand-alone-document disclosure and written-authorization formality lives in section 604(b)(2), fifteen U.S.C. section 1681b(b)(2), which by its own words governs a report procured for employment purposes and does not reach a tenancy. The practice is right; the source is permissible purpose and the agency’s user agreement, not section 604(b)(2). Because a Hawaii screening report typically bundles a credit report, a criminal background check, and an eviction-history check, the consent should make clear what will be gathered.

Consistent Criteria

Written screening criteria must be applied consistently to every applicant. Inconsistency creates both Fair Credit Reporting Act disparate-treatment exposure and Fair Housing Act liability, because bending the rule for one applicant and not another is powerful evidence of discrimination even where none was intended.

No Federal Pre-Adverse Step in Housing

The Fair Credit Reporting Act imposes no pre-adverse action step on a landlord. The two-step procedure that circulates in landlord guidance — hand the applicant a copy of the report and the summary of rights, then wait before acting — is section 604(b)(3), fifteen U.S.C. section 1681b(b)(3), and that subsection applies only in using a consumer report for employment purposes. Section 603(h) defines employment purposes as evaluating a consumer for employment, promotion, reassignment or retention as an employee, and renting a home is none of those four things. So in housing there is no waiting period before the decision, no duty to enclose the report, and no duty to enclose the summary of rights — furnishing that summary is a duty of the consumer reporting agency under section 609(c)(2), and the applicant’s route to the report is the free copy from the agency described below. Because there is no federal waiting period to observe, the commonly repeated figure of at least five business days has no statutory source in a housing decision at all.

Adverse Action Notice

This is the landlord’s real federal notice duty, and it runs after the decision, not before it. Under Fair Credit Reporting Act section 615(a), fifteen U.S.C. section 1681m(a), any person who takes an adverse action based in whole or in part on information in a consumer report must give the consumer notice of the adverse action, which may be oral, written or electronic; the name, address and telephone number of the consumer reporting agency that furnished the report, including its toll-free number where the agency reports nationwide; a statement that the agency did not make the decision and is unable to give the specific reasons for it; and notice of the applicant’s right to obtain a free copy of the report from that agency within sixty days and to dispute anything inaccurate or incomplete in it. If a numerical credit score was used in the decision, section 615(a)(2) adds a duty to disclose the score, its source, the date it was created, the range of scores under that model, and the key factors that adversely affected it. The Federal Trade Commission’s landlord guidance treats written notice as the best practice rather than a legal requirement. This step is not optional, and it applies to any adverse action — not only an outright denial, but also a larger deposit than another applicant would pay, a higher rent, or a co-signer requirement driven by the report, each of which is an adverse action under section 603(k)(1)(B)(iv). The notice is owed even where the report was not the primary reason for the decision.

The Act 200 actual-cost rule under section 521-46

Hawaii regulates what a landlord may charge to screen an applicant, but it does so differently from states that publish a fixed dollar cap. Under Act 200, codified at Hawaii Revised Statutes section 521-46 and effective May 1, 2024, a landlord may not charge an application screening fee that is more than the actual cost of obtaining the information about the applicant. There is no set ceiling in dollars; the ceiling is whatever the landlord genuinely spends on the credit report, tenant report, criminal background check, or personal reference checks from a consumer reporting agency. The section names no administering or enforcing agency. What Act 200 does, in section 2, is direct that the Hawaii Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs Office of Consumer Protection “shall produce and make available informational materials regarding, and widely publicize the requirements for, application screening fees.” That is a publicity duty rather than administration, and the resulting guidance is published at the Hawaii Office of Consumer Protection tenant screening fee FAQ.

Three duties ride with the fee. First, any portion of the fee not actually used for the authorized screening purposes must be refunded within thirty days after the landlord submits the screening request — so if the landlord never runs a report, the whole fee comes back. Second, on request the landlord must give the applicant a receipt and a breakdown of the costs the fee covered, which lets an applicant check the charge against the real cost. Third, the fee may be charged only at the time the application is processed, and only to an adult eighteen or older or an emancipated minor who is applying to rent. Charging a screening fee is optional; the Office of Consumer Protection has noted that a contract term forcing a landlord to charge one may be unenforceable or void as against public policy.

Generally no. One of the most consequential recent changes to Hawaii screening is source-of-income protection. Under Act 310 — Senate Bill 206 of 2022, codified at Hawaii Revised Statutes section 368F-2 — and effective May 1, 2023, it is unlawful to discriminate against an applicant or tenant based on their participation in the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program or a permanent supportive housing program. A covered landlord may not advertise that vouchers are not accepted, may not refuse to engage in a rental transaction because of the voucher, and may not impose rental conditions different from those required of an applicant who is not using assistance.

Enforcement runs through a court, not the Hawaii Civil Rights Commission. Hawaii Revised Statutes section 368F-4 provides that a landlord who violates the chapter “may be subject to a civil penalty in an amount not to exceed $2,000 if determined by the court” to have violated it for the first time within one year, that the court may impose a $2,500 penalty for a subsequent violation, that the court may order any injunctive or other equitable relief, and — a point that changes the economics of any claim — that “no party shall be awarded attorney’s fees or costs in any action under this section.” The Commission’s complaint jurisdiction under section 368-3(1) covers part I of chapter 489, chapter 515, part I of chapter 378 and complaints under chapter 368; chapter 368F is not on that list. Section 3 of Act 310 gives the Commission and the Hawaii public housing authority a purely informational role: they “shall produce and make available informational materials” and “widely publicize the prohibition against discrimination based on source of income.”

The size threshold is black-letter, not reported. Section 368F-3 disapplies section 368F-2 entirely to six categories: (1) landlords determining in a commercially reasonable manner an applicant’s ability to pay rent by verifying the source and amount of income or by evaluating the stability, security and creditworthiness of the applicant or of any source of income; (2) landlords with ownership of not more than four dwelling units in the State at the time of the alleged discriminatory transaction — unless the owner, individually or through a business entity, owns more than a ten per cent interest in more than four dwelling units in the State; (3) landlords where a source of income is not approved within twenty-one days of a good-faith request for tenancy approval including unit inspection; (4) an owner-occupied building of not more than two families; (5) an owner-occupied rental of a room or up to four rooms; and (6) an affordable housing project subsidized by public funds or lands. A landlord at or below the four-unit line is therefore outside the prohibition altogether, and exemption (1) is the one that governs ordinary screening. Importantly, this does not strip a landlord of the right to screen. The landlord may still apply neutral, consistent criteria — credit, income measured against the tenant’s own share of the rent, and rental history — to a voucher holder exactly as to any other applicant. What the law forbids is treating the voucher itself as a disqualifier or steering voucher holders away.

The Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in housing based on seven federally protected classes, and Hawaii’s fair housing statute, chapter 515 of the Hawaii Revised Statutes, adds several more. Screening criteria must be facially neutral, predictive of tenancy success, and consistently applied, and they must not produce a disparate impact on any protected class — a criterion that looks neutral but disproportionately excludes a protected group can still be unlawful.

Federal Protected Classes

The Fair Housing Act protects race and color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status meaning the presence of children, and disability whether mental or physical. Whether the statutory word “sex” also covers sexual orientation and gender identity is now an open federal question. HUD withdrew its February 9, 2021 memorandum applying Bostock v. Clayton County to the Fair Housing Act effective September 25, 2025 (Docket FR-6617-N-01, 91 Federal Register 44867, published July 17, 2026), and withdrew the February 11, 2021 memorandum implementing Executive Order 13988 effective September 17, 2025 (Docket FR-6571-N-01). The statutory text of the Act is unchanged and Bostock was a Title VII employment case, so the withdrawal removes the interpretation HUD had stated without settling the question the other way. In Hawaii the federal question does not change the answer: chapter 515 of the Hawaii Revised Statutes protects sex, including gender identity or expression, and lists sexual orientation as its own class, at section 515-3(a), so refusing an applicant on either ground is unlawful in Hawaii however the federal question resolves — but only subject to the chapter’s own exemptions at HRS section 515-4, which on these two classes are unusually specific and must not be skipped. Section 515-4(a) switches section 515-3 off entirely for (1) the rental of a housing accommodation in a building containing accommodations for no more than two families living independently of each other where the owner or lessor resides in one of them, and (2) the rental of a room, or up to four rooms, in a housing accommodation in which the owner or lessor resides. Section 515-4(b) goes further and names these very classes: nothing in section 515-3 “shall be deemed to prohibit refusal because of sex, including gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or marital status” to rent housing owned or operated by a religious institution and used for church purposes, or forming part of a religiously affiliated institution of higher education housing program. A narrow exemption therefore exists for certain very small owner-occupying landlords and for religious and religiously affiliated college housing; verify whether it applies before relying on it. Hawaii recognizes each of these and adds more of its own.

Hawaii’s Expanded Protections

Chapter 515 makes it a discriminatory practice for an owner or other person in a real estate transaction to discriminate based on race, sex including gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, color, religion, marital status, familial status, ancestry, disability, age, or human immunodeficiency virus infection. On top of that list, Act 310 protects source of income for voucher and permanent supportive housing participants. One point of frequent confusion: Hawaii’s protection for a person’s arrest and court record lives in the employment law, not in the housing statute, so it does not by itself bar a landlord from considering criminal-conviction history within the Fair Housing Act limits below. The chapter 515 protections are enforced by the Hawaii Civil Rights Commission.

Common Hawaii Fair-Housing Traps

• Blanket criminal-history bans that auto-reject any record — the classic disparate-impact target under 24 CFR 100.500.
• Rigid credit-score cutoffs applied with no individualized review of the applicant’s full picture.
• Income multipliers that disproportionately exclude single parents, implicating familial status.
• No-voucher policies, which are unlawful for covered landlords under Act 310 source-of-income protection.
• Denying reasonable accommodations to applicants with a disability.
• Inconsistent application of criteria across applicants of different protected classes.

A Hawaii landlord may consider criminal history. Because Hawaii has no statewide or local ban-the-box or fair-chance ordinance for housing, everything on this question comes from federal law — which makes it especially important to be exact about what federal law now is, because most of what circulates on this topic is out of date.

HUD’s April 4, 2016 guidance on the use of criminal records was withdrawn effective September 25, 2025 (Notice of the Withdrawal of OGC Guidance Documents, Docket FR-6617-N-01, 91 Federal Register 44867, published July 17, 2026), and its June 10, 2022 implementation memorandum was withdrawn effective September 17, 2025 (Docket FR-6571-N-01). HUD’s notice states that the withdrawn documents “have been removed from active use and should not be relied upon as authoritative.” A landlord, a screening vendor or a guide still describing that 2016 guidance as the standard is describing a document HUD has pulled.

What survives is more than enough to matter. The Fair Housing Act itself is unchanged, and HUD’s discriminatory-effects rule at 24 CFR section 100.500 — reinstated effective May 1, 2023 — is still in force. Under it, a policy of rejecting every applicant with any record can still be challenged as disparate-impact discrimination, because criminal records disproportionately affect Black and Hispanic applicants, and that is true whether or not any guidance document exists. Section 100.500 is a burden-shifting litigation standard: the plaintiff must prove the practice causes a discriminatory effect; the landlord must then prove the practice is necessary to one or more substantial, legitimate, nondiscriminatory interests; and the plaintiff may still prevail by proving a less discriminatory practice would serve those interests.

Read that carefully, because it is where the common advice goes wrong. Section 100.500 imposes no individualized-assessment step and no notice before a denial. The “individualized assessment” requirement came only from the withdrawn 2016 guidance. So the five factors below are not a federal procedure a Hawaii landlord is legally obliged to run — they are prudent risk management, and precisely the documentation a landlord would need to carry the section 100.500 burden if a policy were ever challenged. That is a strong reason to work them, and an honest description of why. Finally, section 100.500 is itself the subject of a pending HUD proposal to remove it: a supplemental proposed rule published August 10, 2026 (Docket FR-6540-P-02, RIN 2529-AB09) reopened the comment period on HUD’s January 2026 proposal, and comments are due by October 9, 2026. It is proposed only. Nothing has removed the rule, and a landlord should screen against section 100.500 as it stands today.

The Five Assessment Factors

• Nature and severity of the offense. A decades-old shoplifting conviction differs materially from a recent violent crime or manufacturing charge.
• Time since the conviction. More recent offenses carry more predictive weight; very old convictions may have little probative value.
• Evidence of rehabilitation. Consistent employment, completed parole or probation, continuing education, or recovery documentation can rebut the presumption of risk.
• Relevance to tenancy. The offense should bear on the specific risk — violent or property crimes bear more directly than a traffic or minor drug-possession offense might.
• Consistent application. Apply the same analysis to every applicant with any criminal history; selectivity creates disparate-treatment exposure.

Hawaii applicants have strong federal rights under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, supplemented by state-level protection: the actual-cost fee and receipt rule under Hawaii Revised Statutes section 521-46 and the source-of-income protection under Act 310. Understanding these rights matters for applicants who want to contest an inaccurate report and for landlords who want to avoid liability. Applicants can learn to spot problems early using our guide to red flags in a rental application, which cuts both ways.

The Five Core Rights

• Right to know a report will be pulled. In practice the landlord discloses that a consumer report will be obtained and takes the applicant’s written authorization before pulling it, because the screening agency’s user agreement requires it; the applicant may decline and withdraw. The stand-alone written-disclosure formality in section 604(b)(2) is an employment rule, so this one rests on permissible purpose and the agency’s user agreement rather than on a housing statute.
• Right to an adverse action notice. If the report causes any adverse action — rejection, a higher deposit, or added requirements — the applicant is owed a notice identifying the consumer reporting agency and explaining dispute rights.
• Right to a free copy of the report. When an adverse action is taken, the applicant may obtain a free copy of the report from the agency, generally within sixty days.
• Right to dispute inaccuracies. The applicant may dispute inaccurate information with the agency, which must investigate, generally within thirty days, and correct or remove anything it cannot substantiate.
• Right to a fee receipt and refund. Under section 521-46 the applicant may request a receipt and breakdown of the screening-fee costs, and any unused portion of the fee must be returned within thirty days.

A disciplined, day-by-day workflow is what turns the legal requirements into a repeatable process that consistently produces defensible decisions. The exact timing can flex, but the sequence — disclose, consent, report, decide, notice — should not. A fuller walkthrough of each stage lives in our how to screen a tenant step-by-step guide, and the underlying paperwork is covered in our rental application guide for landlords.

The rules become concrete when applied to real situations. Each of the following turns on the same handful of principles — written consent, the actual-cost fee, the adverse action notice, consistent criteria, source-of-income protection, and individualized criminal review. A deeper treatment of the criminal-history piece is in our guide to criminal history in tenant screening.

Hawaii landlords who follow this playbook virtually never face a Fair Credit Reporting Act or fair-housing claim. The list is short, but every item is load-bearing. Build it into your standard operating procedure and the liability largely disappears.

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