Hawaii has no state DMV. Your certificate of title is issued by the director of finance of the county you live in, which is why the transfer fee is ten dollars on Oahu and twenty on Maui, and why the form you download depends on which island you are standing on. What does not change across the four counties: the seller signs Section A on the front of the certificate, tears the notice of transfer off the top, and files it within ten days. Here is the whole thing, taken from the City and County of Honolulu Division of Motor Vehicle, Licensing and Permits' own pages and the forms themselves.
Start hereHow to fill out a Hawaii titleThe lettered sections of a Hawaii certificate, which half of the sheet each one lives on, and the strip across the top that is your notice of sale.Open the walkthrough →Scroll to Ownership Transfer for Sellers and the county states the current federal rule exactly: from the 2011 model year on, the reading is required on vehicles twenty years old or less, and 2010-or-earlier vehicles do not need one. Scroll a little further to Death of Owner and the same page tells a surviving joint owner to fill in the reading for vehicles that are ten years or less, because vehicles eleven years or older are not required to have one. That second sentence is the rule as it stood before 2019 and it is wrong by a decade. If you are settling a relative's car and you read only that paragraph, you will leave the mileage blank on a 2016 vehicle that federal law still covers.
The federal regulation splits the fleet at the 2011 model year. Anything built as a 2010 model or earlier became exempt ten years after its model year, which by 2026 is all of them. Anything built as a 2011 model or later stays under the disclosure duty for twenty years - so a 2011 car is not exempt until 2031, and everything newer is further off still.
Model year 2011 or newer: Write the reading in Section A on the front of the certificate before you sign it. Hawaii's forms all print (NO TENTHS) beside the blank, so round to whole miles, and tick a box only if the number is untrue.
Model year 2010 or older: Exempt, and there is nowhere to say so: no Hawaii county form carries an exempt box. Leave the reading blank rather than inventing a figure, and take the county's seller instructions over its estate paragraph if the two disagree.
A reading already written wrong: Do not scratch it out. Honolulu publishes a one-page correction statement, CS-L(MVR)70, whose whole job is to say what the number should have been and to unpick a box that should never have been ticked.
Honolulu Division of Motor Vehicles, Ownership Transfer for Sellers
You, the seller: Section A is on the FRONT of the certificate and it is the whole of your job on the document. Write the odometer reading, then date it, print your name and sign. Joint owners both date, print and sign - the county says so twice. Then tear the notice of transfer off the top of the certificate, fill it in, and keep the rest of the sheet moving toward the buyer.
The buyer: The buyer works on the BACK. Section D is the application for transfer by the new registered owner, and both parties sign it if the car will be jointly registered. They then have thirty days from the date you wrote in Section A to bring the certificate, the last-issued registration and a current safety inspection certificate to a satellite city hall.
The notary question, answered in the county's own words. Notarising is optional here, and worth it anyway.
Honolulu states plainly that notarisation of the seller's signature is optional, and then gives the reason to do it anyway: it prevents rejection for an irregular signature when the clerk compares yours against the one on file, or when the transfer is recorded in another county. Two situations turn optional into required - a second buyer recording a double transfer needs a notarized bill of sale or seller power of attorney, and an out-of-county or out-of-state certificate the recorded owner never released needs a notarized bill of sale.
A Hawaii sale runs on two deadlines that belong to different people. Yours is ten days, from the date of transfer, to get the notice of transfer to the county where the vehicle was last registered; the fine for missing it runs up to $100. The buyer's is thirty days, from the date you wrote in Section A, to bring the endorsed certificate in - after which their transfer fee grows by a fifty-dollar penalty. Neither clock starts anything if the wall is up.
City and County of Honolulu Division of Motor Vehicle, Licensing and Permits, title requirements
The full box-by-box walkthrough is here, with a printable checklist.
Four documents cover an ordinary Hawaii sale, and only one of them is a form the seller downloads. The notice of transfer is printed on the title; the bill of sale is optional until the price or the lien wording matters; the registration application belongs to the buyer; and the letter of authorization exists because a company cannot sign anything.
Hawaii has no lien-release form. A lender releases in Section B on the back of the certificate, or writes a lien satisfaction letter, and the only lien form any county publishes is the one a lender uses after repossessing the car - which is here so you can recognise it as not yours.
Lost, never delivered, defaced, or right in every box except the mileage. These are the five Honolulu forms that get a Hawaii sale back onto paper it can use, and the only price printed on any of them is the ten dollars on the duplicate title.
Two powers of attorney, one for each side of the deal, both notarised. The seller's version makes the owner write the odometer reading on the form itself, so the agent can only disclose the mileage the owner disclosed.
One affidavit under the small-estate section of Hawaii's probate code, sworn on oath, with a state-certified death certificate beside it. If the car was jointly owned, the survivor does not need it at all.
Junking and storing are opposite decisions made on similar-looking forms. One surrenders the title for cancellation forever; the other surrenders the plates and keeps the vehicle alive on paper.
Plates stay on a sold Hawaii car, so these three are the housekeeping around them: a plate or emblem that has gone missing, an address the county is writing to, and a car that lives in a different county from its owner.
Read the Honolulu seller instructions to the end and you will notice what is missing. The list of what you hand over is the endorsed certificate of title, the last-issued certificate of registration, the State of Hawaii safety inspection certificate, and a letter of authorization if the car belongs to a company. No plate removal. No plate surrender. No trip to hand anything in. Maui's seller page lists the same three documents and says nothing about plates either. Ordinary Hawaii plates belong to the car and stay on it.
The exceptions are the plates with words on them. A personalised plate must be transferred, stored or retired before the car changes hands: give it up and it is retired permanently, never reused, though you may keep the front plate as a memento and surrender the back. Want to keep it for your next car, and you surrender it at a satellite city hall for storage, apply for replacement plates, and collect it from the same office when the next vehicle arrives.
The buyer drives away on your plates, legally, with the registration certificate you handed over sitting in the car. That is the ordinary Hawaii sale and it is why so many sellers here never think about plates at all - which is exactly why the veteran-plate rule catches people, because it is the one plate that silently blocks the record from changing.
The county's own answer on the new plates is that any license plate issued after 2 January 2025 must have an okina in HAWAI'I - the 2024 legislature passed HB 1861 and the governor signed it as Act 64, amending section 249-9. Plates issued before then are still valid and do not need to be replaced. Swapping voluntarily is a $5.50 replacement at a satellite city hall, and the county recommends surrendering the old plate while you are there.
Hawaii's notice of sale is not a download. It is printed across the head of the certificate of title as a detachable form, and the seller's instruction is to detach it, fill in the new owner's name and address and the seller's signature, and submit it within ten days to the county where the vehicle was last registered. Torn off years ago, or lost? Each county publishes a standalone replacement - Honolulu's is CS-L(MVR)53, the County of Hawaii's is VRL-MVR504 - and it does the same job on the same ten-day clock.
The form tells you exactly what it does and does not do. It reports the sale so that liability for parking and traffic violations, and for civil litigation arising from operation after the date of sale, becomes the responsibility of the subsequent purchaser. It does not constitute application for transfer of ownership - the county's capitals, not ours - and your name comes off the record only when the buyer applies for transfer with the endorsed certificate and the validated registration you gave them.
Filing it does not end your insurance, and Hawaii is a bad state to guess about that.
The notice tells the county who has the car. Your insurer learns nothing from it. Keep the policy running until the buyer has actually recorded the transfer - the county recommends both of you go in together for exactly this reason, and a joint appointment for a single vehicle transfer can be handled in one visit at any satellite city hall. The other reason to keep the cover live: a valid Hawaii insurance identification card is one of the two documents a safety check inspector asks for, so an early cancellation can strand a sale that still needs an inspection. Honolulu Division of Motor Vehicles, going in together to transfer.
Honolulu Division of Motor Vehicles, what a seller hands to the new owner
Register at a satellite city hall within 30 days of the purchase. Nothing is charged on the price. Neither Honolulu's nor Maui's transfer page puts a purchase tax on the list of what is due at the counter, because Hawaii has no sales tax on a private vehicle sale - the general excise tax is a tax on business income, not a levy you collect from your buyer. The tax Hawaii does charge every year is on WEIGHT: the office-use column of the registration application itemises county tax, state tax, state registration and a beautification charge, none of which has anything to do with what the car sold for. What the buyer actually pays is the county's transfer fee - $10 on Oahu, $20 on Maui - plus the annual registration if the last-issued certificate has expired or will expire within forty-five days. Miss the thirty-day window and both counties add a $50 penalty. Arrears travel with the car, not the seller: a buyer taking on a delinquent registration is assessed for the prior years it went unregistered.
What they need to bring:
Nothing read for this state describes an emissions or smog programme in any of the four counties, and neither the state Department of Transportation's motor vehicle pages nor any county's transfer instructions mention one. What Hawaii runs instead is the Periodic Motor Vehicle Inspection programme, and it is not a formality you can leave to the buyer: the county states that title transfer transactions may only be completed once the vehicle is current on both motor vehicle registration and safety inspection. An out-of-date sticker is not a haggling point here. It is a stop sign.
If the county's computerised record shows an expired safety check when you go to transfer or renew, the owner has to produce proof of a current inspection on the spot. Sorting that out before you advertise the car is the single most useful thing a Hawaii seller can do. Hawaii Department of Transportation, safety inspection fees for 2025.
City and County of Honolulu Division of Motor Vehicle, Licensing and Permits · figures and rules as of 2026-08-23. Plain-language help with paperwork, not legal advice.
See also: selling a car in Hawaii and the rest of the guides.