What permits do you need to open a contractor or trade in Honolulu County?

There is no single figure, and any site quoting one is rounding away the part that matters. Of the 16 records listed for a contractor or trade in Honolulu County, HI, 1 apply to every business of this type and 15 are conditional. Adding every fee on the page together would overstate what most operators pay, because it would include permits they never need.

3 of the 16 are charged as a range or a formula set by the issuing agency, and 5 have no fee published at all. The ones that vary:

Building Plan Review Fee: 20% of the tentative Building Permit fee (itself calculated from the unpublished Table No. 18-A, based on a preliminary estimated project valuation), capped at $25,000, due upon submission of plans and specifications for review, per ROH 18-6.1(a).

Fire Plans Review Fee: 10% of the Building Permit fee, payable to the City and County of Honolulu before the building permit is issued; waived entirely where an automatic fire sprinkler system (NFPA 13, 13R, or 13D) is installed, per Fire Code Section 1.12.8, as amended.

Conditional Use Permit (Major): $400 non-refundable Initial Review fee, plus a Processing fee of $800 plus $300 per acre (or major fraction, .5 or greater) of the project site, capped at $15,000, per the Department's own current Conditional Use Permit (Major) application instructions.

Permits for a contractor or trade in Honolulu County, HI come from 5 separate offices: City and County of Honolulu, Department of Customer Services, Business License Section, City and County of Honolulu, Department of Planning and Permitting, Honolulu Fire Department, Fire Prevention Bureau, Hawaii Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, Business Registration Division, Hawaii DCCA, Professional and Vocational Licensing Division. No single office issues them all, which is why an opening means filing in several places rather than one.

• City and County of Honolulu, Department of Customer Services, Business License SectionIssues 1 permit on this page: General Business License (not required by Honolulu County)Kapalama Driver Licensing Center, Window #17, 925 Dillingham Blvd., Honolulu, HI 96817 · (808) 768-9700www.honolulu.gov/csd/business-license
• City and County of Honolulu, Department of Planning and PermittingIssues 8 permits on this page, including Commercial Building Permit & Certificate of Occupancy, Building Plan Review Fee, Zoning Verification650 South King Street, 7th Floor, Honolulu, HI 96813 · (808) 768-8000www.honolulu.gov/dpp
• Honolulu Fire Department, Fire Prevention BureauIssues 1 permit on this page: Fire Plans Review Fee636 South Street, Honolulu, HI 96813 · (808) 723-7139fire.honolulu.gov/fire-code/permits
• Hawaii Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, Business Registration DivisionIssues 4 permits on this page: Articles of Incorporation, General Business Licence (not required by Hawaii), Articles of Organization (LLC), Annual Report335 Merchant Street, Room 201, Honolulu, HI 96813 · (808) 586-2727cca.hawaii.gov/breg
• Hawaii DCCA, Professional and Vocational Licensing DivisionIssues 2 permits on this page: Contractor Licence, Individual Electrician or Plumber Licence335 Merchant Street, Room 301, Honolulu, HI 96813 · (808) 586-3000cca.hawaii.gov/pvl

No fee applies. The Department of Customer Services' own current Business License page names the complete, fixed set of individual business licenses the City and County of Honolulu issues (Auctioneer, E-GUN, Firearms, Garbage/Refuse, Glass Recycler, Pawn Broker, Peddler, Pedicab, Pepper Spray, Scrap Dealer, Secondhand Dealer, Tear Gas/Obnoxious Substance, Used Vehicle Parts, Wrecking/Salvaging), each priced individually on the Department's own current Fee Table — none of them a general, catch-all business license, and none of them specific to any of this project's ten industries. Hawaii's General Excise Tax Licence, recorded at the state layer, remains the real universal state-level registration every business needs; this county layer adds no general license on top of it.

No fee applies to the base Building Permit figure itself, recorded here as fee: none rather than guessed at. ROH § 18-6.2, read directly, requires a fee for each building permit and 'other fees associated with the administration of the building codes' set by 'Table No. 18-A, set out at the end of this chapter' — a valuation-based fee table this project could not retrieve in any readable form: codelibrary.amlegal.com blocks direct retrieval outright, and Table No. 18-A's own appendix page could not be located among the Wayback Machine captures this project could enumerate for the surrounding chapter, even after individually confirming every neighboring section by its own document ID (see this file's Access Note). The Department's own live online Fee Calculator computes the dollar figure from this same table but only inside non-extractable client-side JavaScript. Two real, confirmed enforcement provisions survive the gap: § 18-6.2(d) triples the fee for work started before a permit is obtained, and § 18-6.2(e) allows the fee to be doubled for an applicant with a history of false statements. No separately published Certificate of Occupancy fee could be found either; it is treated as folded into this same permitting and inspection process. The genuine, confirmed Plan Review Fee and Fire Plans Review formulas layered on top of this same unconfirmed base figure are recorded as their own lines below.

Required whenever a plan or other data must be submitted for review under ROH § 18-4.2; § 18-6.1(b) exempts building permit applications for fences, retaining walls, swimming pools, driveways, or work performed for any city agency. This fee is in addition to, not instead of, the Building Permit fee itself recorded above, and is distinct from the Honolulu Fire Department's own separate 10%-of-building-permit-fee Fire Plans Review recorded below.

Charged whenever plans or specifications are submitted to the Honolulu Fire Department under the Building Code; plans are not approved until this fee is paid. It is a separate, Fire-Department-administered fee from the Department of Planning and Permitting's own 20%-of-tentative-permit-fee Plan Review Fee recorded above, and — like the Building Permit fee it is calculated from — its final dollar amount cannot be computed here because the underlying Building Permit fee table (Table No. 18-A) is not published anywhere this project could retrieve.

No fee applies here — none is published. The Department's own current Zoning Permits page describes this product only as a request for property zoning designations, flood zones, development standards, and use legality, 'submit request through New Zoning Permit on HNL Build' — an online portal this project could not access without an account, and unlike every other zoning permit type on the same page, no instruction PDF or fee schedule exists for it anywhere this project could find.

Required only when a proposed use is not permitted outright in its zoning district but qualifies for Minor Conditional Use approval under the Land Use Ordinance's own Master Use Table; whether a specific business needs it depends on the exact use and zoning district, which this project could not fully reproduce from the Master Use Table's own large, complex format. Doubled if the applicant is cited for taking action without first obtaining approval. This is the general packet covering every Minor CUP use except Communication Towers, Small Meeting Facilities, Child or Adult Daycare, PreK-12 Schools, and certain BMX-3 hotels, which instead follow the separate, differently priced packet recorded below.

Reserved for uses requiring more extensive Major CUP review under the Land Use Ordinance's Master Use Table than the Minor CUP process above — typically larger-scale commercial or industrial projects. Shares the identical acreage-scaled fee structure as the specifically named Minor CUP packet (Communication Tower, Daycare, Schools, BMX-3 hotels) recorded above, a genuine finding this project confirmed by reading both current instruction packets directly.

Provides forgiveness from zoning rules where there is hardship, per Charter § 6-1517, confirmed directly on the Department's own current Zoning Permits page. Doubled if the applicant is cited for taking action without first obtaining approval, the same enforcement pattern confirmed across every DPP zoning application this project read.

Applies only to a proposed project on a property within the coastal Special Management Area, not islandwide — the Department's own current SMA Permit Determination form states directly 'There is a standard fee of $150 per tax map key' to determine whether Chapter 25's own Minor or Major SMA permitting requirements apply at all before any permits issue. This project could not find a published fee schedule for the full Minor or Major SMA permit process itself beyond this threshold determination fee, so no further SMA permit fee is asserted here.

No fee applies. The Department's own current Building Permits FAQ discusses Hawaii Revised Statutes Chapter 444 (the state Contractors License Board, recorded at the state layer) and the owner-builder exemption directly, with no mention anywhere of a separate county contractor registration or credential. DPP verifies an applicant's state contractor licensing status as part of ordinary permit review rather than issuing an additional credential of its own. A Honolulu contractor's local obligations are otherwise the same Commercial Building Permit, Plan Review, and Fire Plans Review fees recorded elsewhere in this file.

The same $51 as an LLC, once the archives fee is included, and the same $25 expedite option.

No fee, beyond the general excise tax licence every business needs anyway. Hawaii's own business action centre, the state's front door for opening a company, treats general excise tax registration as the universal state requirement rather than pointing to any separate general business licence, and no other state page describes one.

Fifty dollars for the filing itself plus a flat $1 state archives fee tacked onto every DCCA filing, for $51 in practice. Expedited processing adds a further $25. A corporation costs the same $51 to form.

There is no single shared filing date in Hawaii — the due date is set entirely by which calendar quarter an entity originally registered in. Register in February and the report falls due every 31 March afterward; register in August and it falls due every 30 September. This has held since 2003, so it is not a recent quirk. Two figures circulate for the fee itself, $15 on the published paper fee schedule and $12.50 in more recent online-filing guidance — filing online appears to be the cheaper channel, but confirm the exact current figure at checkout before relying on either number precisely. Two straight years of non-filing is grounds for involuntary dissolution.

A licence is required once a project's combined cost of labour, materials and taxes exceeds $1,000 — a strikingly low threshold compared with most states — unless the work needs no building permit and stands alone rather than as part of a larger project. General engineering, general building and specialty work each fall under this same board and this same fee, $338 to renew an entity or sole proprietor licence and $208 for a responsible managing employee, on a shared biennial cycle ending 30 September of even years regardless of when the licence first issued. Electrical and plumbing contracting sit inside this same system as specialty classifications rather than under a separate contractor board — but the individual electrician or plumber doing the work needs a further, separate licence from an entirely different board; see that record.

This is Hawaii's second, genuinely separate layer for these two trades. Where the contractor licence above covers the business that contracts for electrical or plumbing work, this licence covers the individual doing the hands-on work, issued by an entirely different board on a three-year cycle rather than the contractor board's two-year one. A business needs the first; the qualifying tradesperson it employs needs the second — holding one does not substitute for the other.