Honolulu County, Hawaii property tax

ACS 5-year median real estate taxes paid (table B25103) divided by ACS 5-year median value of owner-occupied housing units (table B25077), county-wide. This is a ratio of two independently estimated medians — not the median of the ratio, and not a rate any parcel is billed. It reflects the actual mix of overlapping districts, exemptions and assessment caps as experienced by owner-occupants, and it lags: a 5-year sample centres about two and a half years before its end date.

Layer 1 of the county property-tax corpus: a MEASURED baseline from ACS 2020-2024 5-year, not a published rate. No statutory rate, assessment ratio or exemption has been collected for these counties yet, so nothing here should be read as what a particular property would be billed.

STATE LAW VS COUNTY ORDINANCE. Only four facts here are state law: the counties alone tax real property (Haw. Const. art. VIII §3); the State levies nothing; Kalawao levies nothing; and nothing but real property is taxed. Everything else — valuation basis, classes, exemptions, the calendar — is the City and County of Honolulu's ordinance (ROH ch. 8), recorded because Honolulu is two-thirds of the State, and it does NOT describe Maui, Hawaii or Kauai, whose ordinances were not read. Those counties' FY2027 rates were read from the statewide RPAD report, which is published by Honolulu's Real Property Assessment Division for all four counties. KALAWAO. Kalawao County (GEOID 15005, population 81) is the Kalaupapa Settlement, "under the jurisdiction and control of the department of health" with "only the powers especially conferred" by HRS §§326-34 to 326-38 — and Art. VIII §3 expressly excludes it from the counties' real property taxing power, leaving that power with the State, which has had no real property tax statute since HRS ch. 246 was repealed (L 2016, c 52, §7). It levies no property tax and none is levied on it — INFERRED from those facts and from its absence from every RPAD statewide report, not from any source that says so; `countyLevies: known(true)` is true for the other four only. The county registry still carries 15005 as unconfirmed; it should be `no-property-tax-levied`. WHY PROVISIONAL. (1) The Honolulu ordinance text was read from American Legal Publishing, a legal-database reproduction that disclaims being the official copy; no official City-hosted text was found. (2) That text post-dates FY2027 — see the header — so the FY2027 Residential A threshold and tiers, the transient-vacation tiers and the home-exemption amounts rest on RPAD's own pages and report, not on the ordinance as served. (3) The other three counties' assessment dates, caps, classes and exemptions were not read in their ordinances. Kauai's own assessment page says it values as of 1 October and caps qualifying owner-occupied assessment growth at 3% (see `caps`); Maui and Hawaii County were not checked, and secondary claims that they assess as of 1 January are not relied on. (4) HRS chapters 246 and 246A, the pre-1981 state real property tax law, were repealed by L 2016, c 52, §§7-8 (Department of Taxation HRS compilation). NOT MODELLED ON THE BILL. Honolulu's real property tax credit for homeowners (ROH ch. 8 art. 13) is an income-tested credit against the bill, but its parameters were not read, so it is absent from `exemptions` rather than guessed. THE SCHEMA QUESTION. `StatePropertyTaxLaw` assumes the state sets a rule its counties then vary. Hawaii is the inverse: there is no state rule, and four counties each enact a complete system. Three choices were made, each the closest honest fit. (a) `classes` holds HONOLULU's class table, labelled in every `localName`, because a merged statewide table would be a fiction and an empty one would fail `classified: true`; Maui's owner-occupied/non-owner-occupied/long-term-rental/TVR-STRH split, Kauai's owner-occupied class and Hawaii County's Homeowner class have no home here and belong on the county records. (b) `commercialDivergence` uses `class-rate-schedule`, not `local-option-classification`: the latter describes a county ratio departing from a uniform state ratio, and in Hawaii nothing varies by ratio and there is no state baseline to depart from. (c) Exemptions are `adoption: 'local-option'` because each is one county's ordinance, even though every county has a home exemption — no statute obliges any of them to. Hotel and resort, transient vacation, bed and breakfast and time share have no `PropertyClass` member and are described under `commercial`; a hotel class would be a vocabulary addition, not something to force.