We've called Maui home for generations. But the median home is now $1.445 million, working families are leaving every month, and the fixes on the table won't fix it on their own. Here's what's actually happening.
The share of Hawaiʻi households earning enough to afford a mortgage on the median single-family home has fallen by more than half since 2012. Even with the slight 2024–25 improvement, the bar has moved far out of reach for working families.
Source: UHERO Hawaiʻi Housing Factbook 2026. Affordable = 30% of household income covers a 30-year mortgage at prevailing rates with 20% down.
Most of us can't afford
to live where we were born.
Wages haven't caught up to housing. Affording the median single-family home now requires a household earning more than 180% of the state's median income, a bar only about one in five households on Maui can clear.
UHERO Hawaiʻi Housing Factbook 2026 →The December 2025 law phasing out roughly 7,000 vacation rentals in apartment-zoned buildings, with the West Maui phase-out beginning in 2029 and the rest of the county by 2031.
KITV: Bill 9 signed into law →More than 20,000 people have left Hawaiʻi since 2020. Most of them locals. Most of them for the mainland. UHERO's migration analysis follows where they're going and why.
UHERO: Hawaiʻi migration trends →5,500+ housing units were destroyed by the 2023 wildfires. Two and a half years later, 192 rebuilt homes are habitable and 57% of damaged lots have no permit activity at all.
See The Response →The Department of Hawaiian Home Lands holds a multi-decade waitlist of Native Hawaiians waiting for land promised under the 1921 Hawaiian Homes Commission Act. This is the constitutional ground every housing conversation stands on.
DHHL: applicant waiting list →Maui's median asking rent now leads the state. The post-fire scramble pulled long-term rentals off the market and into short-term listings, concentrating families into a smaller, pricier pool. More than half of Maui renters spend over 30% of their income just on rent.
UHERO Factbook 2026: rent & rent burden →New developments we are following, with the source for each. Newest first.
Civil Beat, drawing on the University of Hawaiʻi’s 2026 Housing Factbook, reports that the market has improved only a little and residents still face the highest housing costs in the country. Statewide, 57% of renters are rent burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on rent, and slightly more than a quarter pay over half. For many families here, the piece says, it comes down to impossible choices between rent, food, and staying at all.
Housing is the biggest line in the cost-of-living story, but it isn't the whole story. Hawaiʻi imports most of its food, and power, gas, and groceries all run well above the mainland while paychecks have not kept up.
Read Our Costs →