Hawaii Crash Reporting Requirements
In Hawaii, the crash reporting threshold is $3,000 in damage. Deadline to file: 1 day. Submit to: Your county chief of police.
- Damage threshold
- $3,000
A written report is due whenever anyone is killed or injured, or property damage to any one person — including you — exceeds $3,000. The immediate-notice duty uses a slightly different test: total damage to all property of $3,000 or more, which can be reached by adding up damage the written-report test would look at one owner at a time.
- Deadline to file
- 1 day
Twenty-four hours, not ten days. The driver must report "at the earliest practical time, and in any event within twenty-four hours after the accident". On top of that, notice of a reportable crash must be given to the nearest police officer immediately, by the quickest means of communication. If the driver is physically unable, a capable occupant takes over; if no report is filed at all, the registered owner has ten days from learning of the crash. Failing to report lets the administrator suspend your license until the report is filed and for up to thirty days more.
- Submit to
- Your county chief of police
In writing or in person to the chief of police, on the form the chief of police and the administrator prescribe — there is no state agency in the loop, and there is no mailing address in Honolulu that serves the whole state. If you already filed the same report under a county ordinance or other law, no second report is required.
Hawaii sets $3,000 — higher than 40 of the 44 jurisdictions on this site. The range runs from $250 to $4,000.
How Hawaii compares with every other state
What this means after a crash
$3,000 is the number to keep in mind, and it is a damage figure rather than an injury one: a crash with no one hurt still has to be reported once the damage reaches it. Only 1 of the 44 that set a dollar figure start higher. Note what the threshold is measured against — apparent damage at the scene, not the final repair invoice — so the call has to be made before anyone has priced anything.
You have 1 day. 13 of the 43 with a day count give you less time, 29 give you more. The clock runs from the crash, not from the insurance claim or the repair estimate, and it keeps running while you wait to hear whether the police filed a report of their own.
Who receives it matters as much as when. In Hawaii the report goes to Your county chief of police. An officer writing a report at the scene is not automatically the report the state is waiting for — where the two are separate, the table above says who receives yours.
Every statute cited for Hawaii
Why the rule looks like this
- What Changed in 2026Liability minimums doubled in Hawaii, two states dropped pure comparative fault, New Hampshire stopped inspecting cars, and three crash reporting thresholds moved — a dated account of the 2026 changes, and the ones already signed for 2027 and beyond.
- The Crash You Are Required to Report Is Smaller Than You ThinkCrash-report triggers start at $500 in Georgia and New Jersey and reach $3,000 for a Virginia police report; Florida's is $500 before 1 October 2026 and $2,000 from that date, and Pennsylvania and Maryland use no dollar figure at all.
More on Hawaii
Checked against the primary sources above on September 28, 2026. If a figure here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it — what we have corrected so far is public.