Buyer’s Guide
Maui Property Taxes Explained: What Buyers Need to Budget For
Nobody flies to Maui to think about property taxes. They come for the water and weather and the way the sun dips over the horizon behind swaying palms and they get to the tax question later — usually somewhere over the Pacific on the flight home, working the numbers on the back of a cocktail napkin. I would rather you do that math now, on the ground, with the real figures in front of you. They are easier to stomach when they are not a surprise, and only a little harder when they are.
Section One
What the County Is Taxing
Here is the thing that catches nearly every buyer from the mainland or Canada: Maui does not tax what you paid. It taxes a value the county assigns your property on its own schedule, times a rate that depends on how the county has decided to classify you. Two identical units in the same building, same floor, same view, can owe wildly different amounts, because the tax follows what a property is for, not what it sold for.
The county sorts every parcel by its “highest and best use” — a phrase that means, roughly, the most profitable thing you could plausibly do with the place, whether or not you have the slightest intention of doing it. Then it hands out exceptions to owners who file the right forms. So before you multiply anything, the question that matters is not “what will I pay.” It is “what does the county think I am.” For most of my buyers, who want a second home and not a new life, the answer is not the flattering one.
Section Two
The 2026–2027 Rates
These are the rates the County Council adopted on May 15, 2026, in Resolution 26-69, effective for the fiscal year that opened July 1. The vote was unanimous — nine ayes, no dissent to appeal to. Every number below is dollars per $1,000 of net taxable assessed value, and the tiers behave like federal income-tax brackets: the first slice of value gets the Tier 1 rate, the next slice the Tier 2 rate, and up the ladder from there. Nobody pays the top rate on the whole amount, which is the one act of mercy in the entire structure.
The residential classes buyers land in most often — FY2026–27, per $1,000 assessed value
Classification | Tier 1 | Tier 2 | Tier 3 |
Owner-Occupied Primary residence w/ home exemption | $1.65 ≤ $1.5M | $1.80 $1.5M–$4.5M | $5.00 over $4.5M |
Non-Owner-Occupied Second home, no STR permit | $6.25 ≤ $1M | $9.00 $1M–$2.5M | $17.00 over $2.5M |
TVR-STRH Short-term / vacation rental condos & homes | $13.00 ≤ $900K | $15.00 $900K–$3M | $17.00 over $3M |
Long-Term Rental Signed 1-yr+ lease, exemption filed | $2.90 ≤ $1.5M | $5.00 $1.5M–$3M | $8.50 over $3M |
The non-owner-occupied Tier 3 entry point dropped this year from $3M to $2.5M, so a larger share of a luxury second home now sits in the $17.00 band.
The Flat & Specialty Rates
A handful of classes carry one rate and no tiers: Apartment at $3.50, Hotel & Resort at $11.80, Timeshare at $14.90, Agricultural at $5.74, Conservation at $6.43, Commercial at $6.05, and Industrial at $7.05. There is also a Commercialized Residential class — your own residence with a bed-and-breakfast or short-term-rental permit attached — running $2.25, $3.50, and $10.00 across its three tiers. Most buyers never meet these. I list them so you can see the full shape of the thing the county has built.
Section Three
The Classification That Catches Second-Home Buyers
This is where the cocktail-napkin math goes wrong. Buy a condo in a building the county recognizes for transient vacation-rental use, and you can be taxed at the TVR-STRH rate whether or not you ever rent it to a soul. Use it yourself six weekends a year, leave it dark the rest, list it nowhere — none of that moves the needle. The classification follows the building’s character, not your habits. The county is taxing the rental income you could be earning and have quietly chosen to forgo.
The penalty for that restraint is steep. A second home the county files as non-owner-occupied opens at $6.25 per $1,000. The identical value in a vacation-rental building opens at $13.00. You can double your entry rate without hosting a single guest, on the strength of the address and the building’s paperwork alone. All of it is knowable before you make an offer — pulling a property’s current classification takes me about five minutes — and it is five minutes better spent than almost any other in the deal.
The county has settled on a quiet philosophy: the people who live here should pay the least, and everyone who owns from a distance should help cover the view. Read the rate schedule in that light and it all comes into focus. |
Section Four
What It Costs
Enough theory. Here are four buyers and four annual bills, every one of them on the 2026–2027 schedule.
$1,650 Primary residence · $1.3M Owner-occupied, after the $300,000 home exemption. $1,000,000 taxable × $1.65. |
| $19,750 Second home · $2.5M Non-owner-occupied. $6,250 in Tier 1, then $13,500 in Tier 2. |
| ||
$62,250 Luxury second home · $5M Non-owner-occupied, all three tiers — the top $2.5M taxed at $17.00. |
| $20,700 Vacation-rental condo · $1.5M TVR-STRH. More tax than the $2.5M second home — on a property worth a million less. |
Read those in order. The $1.5 million rental condo owes more than the $2.5 million second home and nearly as much as the one worth twice its price, which tells you the county cares far more about the classification than the number on the deed. And the jump from the first bill to the third is not an error in my spreadsheet. It is what the word “second” costs, per year, for as long as you own the place. Here is the tier stack behind the two examples that surprise people most:
Property | Tier | Value in tier | Rate | Tax |
$5M second home Non-owner-occupied | Tier 1 | $1,000,000 | $6.25 | $6,250 |
| Tier 2 | $1,500,000 | $9.00 | $13,500 |
| Tier 3 | $2,500,000 | $17.00 | $42,500 |
$1.5M rental condo TVR-STRH | Tier 1 | $900,000 | $13.00 | $11,700 |
| Tier 2 | $600,000 | $15.00 | $9,000 |
Figures assume no exemption. Your real bill rides on the county’s assessed value, not your purchase price — which brings us to the two things that move the number after you have closed.
Section Five
How to Stop Overpaying
If Maui is going to be your home — your actual, sleep-here, register-the-car, file-your-taxes-here home — the county rewards you handsomely. File a home exemption and two things happen at once. Three hundred thousand dollars comes off your assessed value, and you drop into the owner-occupied rate: $1.65 per $1,000 at the bottom tier, against $6.25 for the non-owner-occupied version of the very same house. On a million-dollar taxable value, that is the difference between a bill you would round off and one you would remember.
The exemption is built for residents, though, and it verifies. You have to live in the place at least 270 days a year, not rent it, and have filed Hawaii state income taxes from a Maui County address the year before. It is generous to people who move here and serenely indifferent to people who plan to, eventually, once the market cooperates and the youngest one is off to college. If you are buying from Calgary or Seattle for the holidays, budget at the non-owner-occupied or TVR-STRH rate and think of the resident rate as a reward for a decision you have not made yet.
Three more worth knowing:
i. A long-term-rental exemption takes $200,000 off if you sign a tenant to a lease of a year or longer, and moves you to the long-term-rental rate that tops out at $8.50 rather than $17.00.
ii. Put a long-term rental and your own residence on the same parcel — a cottage out back — and the county caps the combined break at $400,000.
iii. Already hold a home exemption and still find the bill running past 2% of your income? The circuit-breaker exemption was written for exactly that predicament.
All of it runs on one date. File by December 31 and the break applies to the next fiscal year. Miss it, and you spend a year at the higher rate as penance for a form that takes an afternoon. The county does not grant extensions for good intentions.
If you are moving here File the home exemption before December 31. Budget the owner-occupied rate — $1.65 per $1,000 in the bottom tier — on your assessed value minus $300,000. Maui’s fearsome tax reputation is mostly aimed at other people. |
| If it is a getaway or a rental Budget non-owner-occupied ($6.25 / $9.00 / $17.00) or TVR-STRH ($13.00 / $15.00 / $17.00), depending entirely on how the building is classified. Confirm that before you write the offer, and assume no exemption is coming to rescue you. |
Section Six
The Moving Parts
Two last things, because both change the number after the ink dries.
First, the assessment keeps its own calendar, and it is not yours. The county sets your value as of January 1, mails the notice in March, and shuts the appeal window on April 9. The fiscal year opens July 1, bills go out around July 20, and you pay in two installments — August 20 and the following February 20 — an arrangement the county calls a convenience and you will experience as two separate occasions to wince. Assessed value tends to trail the market and trail your purchase price, so a sale at today’s number may not surface on your bill for a while. Pleasant for a year. Less pleasant when the catch-up assessment lands and the honeymoon ends in a single envelope. Budget for what you paid, not for what the last owner was getting away with.
Second — and this matters more on Maui this year than it has in a long time — your classification may not sit still. The live wire is the Kaʻanapali Royal litigation, which is testing how hard the county can lean on its short-term-rental rules, and it is worth a look before you buy into any building whose value depends on rental income. Behind that case, the rules themselves are being rewritten. Bill 9 phases out transient vacation rentals in apartment-zoned districts — West Maui by the end of 2028, South Maui by the start of 2031 — and Bill 88 sets up new H-3 and H-4 hotel-zoning categories as the legal escape hatch for the properties that qualify. The first county-driven rezonings are already grinding forward. For a buyer, this is straightforward enough: the TVR-STRH classification you sign up for today is not promised to you in 2029, and the tax that hangs on it can move when it does. If a property only pencils out at the vacation-rental rate with the vacation-rental income, write your offer assuming both could go.
The Outlook None of this is trending in favor of the buyer who owns from a distance. Year after year the county widens the gap between the people who live here and the people who visit their own homes, and the 2026–2027 schedule did it again — nudging the non-owner-occupied and vacation-rental tiers up while shaving the top owner-occupied rate down. Plan for that gap to keep widening, build your holding costs with room to spare, and you will never be the one doing cocktail-napkin math on the flight home. |
Before you sign anything, let me pull the property’s exact county classification and build you the real number — the right tier stack, the exemptions you will get and the ones you will not, the bill as it will read. It is the difference between a budget that holds through February and one that does not. I do this all day; you should only have to do it once.
These figures come straight from the County of Maui’s Resolution 26-69, FD2, adopted May 15, 2026 and effective July 1, 2026. The county resets its rates every year and is actively rewriting its short-term-rental rules, so confirm anything here against the Real Property Assessment Division before you lean on it. This is general information, not tax or legal advice. RS-86552.
