The rest of what we have written about Hawaii. Every figure is quoted from Hawaii’s own statute or its courts’ own published schedule, and carries the date we last checked it.
Protective orders in Hawaii.
Who can ask for one, what you have to show, what a judge can order, what it costs, and what happens if it is broken — quoted from Hawaii’s own statutes, not summarized.
See a different stateHawaii
Hawaii runs a two-step process under chapter 586 of the Revised Statutes. You first apply for a temporary restraining order, which a judge can make without the other person present; it can last up to 180 days. A show-cause hearing follows, and if the court is satisfied it makes an order for protection for a fixed further period. The two are different orders with different rules, and this page deals with both. A criminal court can separately impose a protective order on a defendant in a pending case, which is not something you apply for.
Does this cover me?
Who can ask for one
Hawaii’s definition of who counts is in s. 586-1, and it includes a category no other state has: reciprocal beneficiaries, Hawaii’s own registered relationship status.
Dating relationships are covered, past or present, and so is anyone you live with or have lived with. You do not have to be related to them or to have been married.
What you have to show
This is where Hawaii is unusual, and it is worth reading the definition slowly. Domestic abuse in Hawaii is not confined to violence. Three of the things on the list involve no physical contact at all.
Each of those last three has its own definition in the same section. Coercive control is defined as "a pattern of threatening, humiliating, or intimidating actions, which may include assaults, or other abuse that is used to harm, punish, or frighten an individual", and the statute then enumerates what that can look like: isolating someone from friends and family; controlling their access to money; monitoring their activities, communications or movements; name-calling and demeaning them; threatening to harm them or their relatives; threatening to publish information about them or to report them to the authorities; damaging their property; and forcing them to take part in criminal activity or child abuse.
That sixth item is close to unique. Threatening to out someone, to publish private material about them, or to report them to immigration or to the police is named in Hawaii’s statute as a form of abuse in its own right.
Can I get something today?
The temporary restraining order, and how long it runs
Hawaii’s temporary order is the longest-running temporary order in the country. Most states measure theirs in days or weeks; Hawaii measures its in months.
One hundred and eighty days — roughly six months — or until a protective order takes its place, whichever comes first. Where the order concerns a minor it can run past the child’s eighteenth birthday.
The show-cause hearing is set no later than fifteen days from the date the temporary order is granted. If the respondent has not been served by then the court can move the date, but not beyond ninety days from the original order.
One provision worth knowing about if getting to a courthouse is itself the problem: where the allegations include domestic abuse, the court must allow you to attend the hearing remotely. In other cases it may permit it, taking into account transport, childcare, work, or fear.
The order after a hearing
How long it lasts, and whether it can be extended
Section 586-5.5 lets the court make a protective order for "a further fixed reasonable period as the court deems appropriate". Hawaii does not issue permanent orders — every order is for a fixed term.
It can be extended. On an application to extend, the court holds a hearing, and it may consider evidence of abuse and threats of abuse that occurred before the original order was made. That matters: you are not required to produce fresh abuse during the life of the order to justify extending it. The history counts.
Beyond the terms carried over from the temporary order, the court may make orders about temporary custody and visitation of children, and may require either or both parties to take part in domestic violence intervention services.
If they break it
What a violation is, and what it carries
Hawaii is one of the few states that puts a mandatory minimum jail term in the statute for breaking a protective order. A judge does not have discretion to go below it.
The offense is a misdemeanour. Where the violation involves domestic abuse, a first conviction carries a mandatory minimum of 48 hours in jail. A second conviction for a domestic abuse violation carries a mandatory minimum of 30 days, as do subsequent violations.
The court must also order the person to complete an assessment at a domestic violence program, and to complete a domestic violence intervention or anger management course as that program determines.
The practical consequence of a mandatory minimum is that a violation is not something a court can wave through. Keep messages, keep a note of dates and times, and report violations rather than absorbing them.
Worth knowing about Hawaii
The things that are different here
Abuse does not have to be physical. Coercive control, extreme psychological abuse and malicious property damage each stand on their own in the definition of domestic abuse.
Threatening to publish information about you, or to report you to the authorities, is named in the statute as a form of coercive control. Almost no other state names it.
The temporary order can run 180 days — far longer than the days or weeks most states allow.
Hearing within fifteen days, and remote attendance must be permitted where domestic abuse is alleged.
Mandatory minimum jail for violations — 48 hours for a first domestic abuse violation, 30 days for a second.
Reciprocal beneficiaries are covered, which is a Hawaii category and does not exist elsewhere.
No permanent orders. Every Hawaii order is for a fixed period, though an extension may rely on the history that led to the first order rather than requiring new abuse.
Firearms
The rule is in the firearms chapter, not chapter 586
Hawaii’s protective order chapter says nothing about firearms — which is why an earlier version of this page said we could not state a rule. The rule exists; it simply lives somewhere else, in the firearms chapter at s. 134-7.
Note how wide that is. It applies to a person restrained "pursuant to an order of any court" from contacting, threatening or physically abusing any person. It is not limited to chapter 586 orders, and it covers ammunition as well as firearms.
On what he has to do with them:
They go to the county police department, not to a dealer and not to a friend — a narrow route, and one that makes compliance easy to verify.
And on refusal:
Refusing to disclose where a firearm is is itself an offense, not only refusing to hand it over. Hawaii registers firearms, so whether someone is the registered owner is a matter of record.
One honest caveat: the section requires surrender but, as we read it, does not attach a number of hours to it the way Colorado, California or Nevada do. What it does is make possession unlawful for the duration of the order from the moment the order is in force.
Can I get something today?
The standard for the temporary restraining order
Two routes in that sentence, and the second does not require anything to have happened yet: threats of abuse that make imminent abuse probable are enough.
On a temporary order the court may enjoin the restrained person from contacting, threatening or physically abusing you; from doing the same to any person residing at your residence; and from entering or visiting your residence. It may order either or both parties to leave the premises.
And on animals, the court may restrain both parties from taking, concealing, removing, threatening, physically abusing or otherwise disposing of any animal identified to the court as belonging to the household. If there is a pet, identify it to the court — the provision only bites on animals the court has been told about.
Firearms in Hawaii: strong prohibition, no stated deadline
What § 134-7(f) does and does not say
Hawaii requires a person subject to a protective order to relinquish firearms to the county police department, and possession is unlawful for the duration of the order. That is a genuine, enforceable prohibition, and Hawaii is not among the states that leave the matter entirely to federal law.
What we could not find, having read the provision, is a number of hours. Unlike California (immediate on request, or 24 hours otherwise), Rhode Island (24 hours), Louisiana (48 hours), New Mexico (48 hours), Wisconsin (48 hours) or North Carolina (immediate, or 24 hours), Hawaii’s provision as we read it does not state a deadline on the face of the statute.
We are not going to print a figure we have not seen, and we would rather say that than repeat a number from a secondary source. What follows practically is simple: if your order does not carry a handover time, ask the judge to write one into it. A deadline on the face of the order is enforceable in a way that a general obligation is not, and asking costs nothing.
The prohibition itself does not depend on the deadline. Possession is unlawful for as long as the order runs, whatever timetable the handover follows.
▸ See how this compares — all 50 states, side by side
The part that is the same in every state
An order from one state works in all of them
This is federal law and it does not change at a state line. An order issued by one state, tribe or territory must be enforced by every other as if that state had issued it. And you do not have to register it in the new state first — registration is optional, not a precondition to enforcement.
The same section also says the enforcing state must not tell the restrained person that the order has been registered there unless the protected person asks it to, and must not publish anything online that would be likely to reveal the protected person’s identity or location.
The federal firearms rule needs a hearing first
This is the single most misunderstood point in the whole subject, and it cuts against what most people assume. The federal prohibition at 18 U.S.C. s. 922(g)(8) reaches a person subject to an order only where three things are true: the order was made after a hearing of which they had actual notice and at which they had a chance to take part; it restrains them in relation to an intimate partner or that partner’s child; and it either carries a credible-threat finding or expressly forbids the use of force.
So an emergency or ex parte order does not trigger the federal prohibition on its own — there has been no hearing yet. State law may go further, and many states do, which is why the state rule is set out on this page separately. In United States v. Rahimi (2024) the Supreme Court upheld s. 922(g)(8), holding that “When an individual has been found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another, that individual may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment.”
This rule is narrower than it looks, and the detail matters. Who counts as an “intimate partner” is a defined term that excludes dating partners you never lived with; the two halves of the third condition are not equally settled after Rahimi; and there is a separate federal route based on convictions rather than orders, which does reach dating partners. We set all of it out, quoted from the United States Code, on one page: Guns and protection orders — the federal rule.
How does this state compare? Ten states do nothing at all about firearms on a protection order; fourteen prohibit possession but give the court no way to collect them. All fifty side by side: which states actually take the guns.
You should not be charged for this — in any state
This is settled, and it is worth knowing before you walk into a courthouse. Under 34 U.S.C. s. 10450, a state applying for STOP grant funding must certify to the Attorney General that its "laws, policies, and practices do not require" a victim to bear the costs associated with the filing, issuance, registration, modification, enforcement, dismissal, withdrawal or service of a protection order or a petition for one — nor the costs of filing criminal charges, or of warrants and witness subpoenas. A jurisdiction that does charge has its funds withheld and redistributed to the states that do not.
Every state receives STOP funding and every state has certified compliance. The practical consequence, in the words of the National Center on Protection Orders and Full Faith & Credit, is that victims "should not be required to pay such costs in any state". That covers having the papers served on the other person, which is the charge people are most often asked for.
Two honest qualifications. The provision does not stop a court charging the respondent — many states order costs against them, and that is permitted. And it is a funding condition rather than a direct federal ban, so what a clerk does on a given day can still be wrong. If you are asked to pay a fee for any of the things listed above, you can say that your state has certified under 34 U.S.C. s. 10450 that it does not charge for them. Advocates can also raise it with the National Center on Protection Orders and Full Faith & Credit on 1-800-903-0111, prompt 2.
Where this state’s own statute says so expressly, that is quoted above.
Authority: Haw. Rev. Stat. ch. 586, "Domestic Abuse Protective Orders." Definitions at s. 586-1. Temporary restraining orders at s. 586-4. Period of order and hearing at s. 586-5. Protective orders and additional orders at s. 586-5.5. Violation at s. 586-11. Firearms at Haw. Rev. Stat. s. 134-7(f). Checked 29 Aug 2026.
How we checked this page
Every quotation on this page was read in the source named in the Authority line above, not taken from a summary or another website. On this date we also re-checked every section cited for repeal, renumbering or amendment since 2024 — the sweep that caught North Dakota’s chapter being repealed and replaced, and Nebraska’s moving to an entirely new title.
One thing we could not do, and we would rather say so:
- The Hawaii State Legislature’s own page for s. 586-11 returned an HTTP 403 and would not open. The text and the mandatory minimum sentences quoted on this page were taken instead from Justia’s reproduction of the same section, which we read in full.
What we cannot promise is that nothing has changed since this date. Quote the words with confidence; check a section number before you put it in a filing. And if anything here does not match what a clerk or judge tells you, the court is right and we are wrong — tell us and we will fix it.
We keep a public record of every time we have got the law wrong on these pages, what caused it, and how long it was live: where we were wrong.
If there are children
What Hawaii presumes about custody, and the emergency jurisdiction that exists when someone has to leave the state.