Honolulu's High-Rise Sprinkler Law: A 50-Year History

The day everything changed

On July 14, 2017, fire tore through the 36-story Marco Polo condominium on Kapiolani Boulevard. Four people died, roughly 200 units were damaged, and the loss topped $100 million. The building, completed in 1971, had no automatic fire sprinklers. The Honolulu Fire Department was blunt afterward: with sprinklers, the fire would likely have been contained to the unit where it started.

That tragedy is the hinge point of every fire-safety rule O'ahu condo owners deal with today. But the story neither begins nor ends there. To understand why your building may — or may not — be facing a costly retrofit, why the deadlines keep moving, why you may no longer get a vote in the decision, and why the real bill is more likely to come from your insurer than from the city, you have to follow a 50-year thread: a 1975 code change, a deadly fire, a string of ordinances, and an insurance market that is quietly forcing the issue.

Here's the whole arc, and where it actually leaves buyers and owners in 2026 — including two things that changed recently and that almost nobody has told owners about.

Why so many towers have no sprinklers

The common shorthand is that Honolulu "first required sprinklers in new high-rises in 1975," so anything older was grandfathered. True as far as it goes — but it's an oversimplification that trips up buyers.

The catch: the high-rise codes of that era often let designers choose full sprinklers or an engineered alternative — compartmentation, smoke control, standpipes, alarms. So new residential towers kept going up without full sprinkler systems well into the 1980s.

The city's own numbers make the point better than any argument. On the Fire Department's current list of existing high-rise residential buildings — 311 buildings containing 38,205 units, last updated April 24, 2026 — the construction dates run from 1953 all the way to 1990. Seventy-eight of those buildings, holding nearly 11,800 units, were built in 1975 or later. Pearlridge Square (1981, 44 floors, 282 units) is on it. So is Makiki Regent, built in 1990.

It matters because today's retrofit law isn't keyed to a build year at all. The covered class is any residential building over 75 feet that existed before the 2018 ordinance and isn't sprinklered throughout. Your tower's age is almost beside the point — what counts is height, interior corridors, and whether sprinklers were ever installed.

One genuinely useful exemption does turn on design: a building is exempt if all dwelling units have exterior access and a continuous egress path out, with no full-length interior corridors. That's the classic older Hawai'i walkway building, and it's not a rare shape — 147 of the 311 buildings on the city's list are flagged as having no interior corridors. If you're looking at one of those, the retrofit question may not apply at all. Worth confirming before you assume a six-figure assessment is coming.

The first retrofit law: Ordinance 18-14

After Marco Polo, Mayor Kirk Caldwell and the City Council moved fast. Bill 69 (2017) became Ordinance 18-14, effective May 2018 — Honolulu's first law requiring existing residential high-rises to upgrade.

It wasn't a pure sprinkler mandate. Faced with owner alarm over cost, the Council built in an alternative: a building could either install sprinklers throughout or pass a professional Fire and Life Safety Evaluation (FLSE) — a scored assessment of the building's existing fire-safety features, covering things like emergency power for elevators, alarm systems, egress routes, and the flammability of wall finishes. Score high enough, and you could opt out of sprinklers.

That compromise defined everything that followed. It gave owners a cheaper path — but compliance was dismal. By late 2022, a little more than 20 of over 300 high-rises had achieved an acceptable score, and the sprinkler path had almost no takers.

When the deadlines slipped: Ordinance 22-2 and Resolution 22-245

With compliance stalling and costs mounting, the Council pumped the brakes. Ordinance 22-2 (Bill 37 (2021)) pushed the deadlines out substantially — and, importantly for what comes next, it kept a provision requiring a majority of unit owners to actually vote to opt out of sprinklers.

Just as telling is what the Council did alongside the law. Resolution 22-245 (2022) didn't change a single rule — a resolution can't — only an ordinance is binding law. But it's a window into legislative sentiment. Its findings openly floated revising or repealing the requirements, citing insurance costs and the burden on fixed-income owners, and directed the administration to work with insurers, condo groups, and state agencies toward future relief. Lawmakers were signaling, in writing, that they were hunting for an off-ramp — even as the underlying mandate stayed firmly on the books.

What actually changed: Ordinance 25-4 took away your vote

Here is the part that has not been well communicated to owners, and it is the single most important update in this article.

The current source of truth is Ordinance 25-4 — originating as Bill 55 (2024), CD2, introduced October 2, 2024, passed on third reading December 11, 2024, and effective on approval, January 3, 2025. It adopted the 2021 edition of the national NFPA 1 Fire Code as Honolulu's fire code and repealed and re-enacted the entire fire-code chapter, consolidating the high-rise sprinkler rules into Section 13.3.2.25.2.

It did not merely carry the old deadlines forward. It loosened the law in three specific ways, and the Council's own committee report says so in plain language. Ordinance 25-4:

1. Removed the owner vote. Under the prior law, an association could only opt out of sprinklers if a majority of unit owners (or shareholders, in a co-op) decided to — "either by vote at a regularly scheduled or special meeting... or by written consent." Ordinance 25-4 struck that requirement entirely. The Council's summary of the committee draft describes the change as: "Remove the requirement that a majority of unit owners of a condominium or a majority of shareholders of a cooperative housing corporation decide to opt out of the automatic fire sprinkler requirement."

Today, Section 13.3.2.25.2.3 simply says the association of apartment owners of a building 10 floors or higher may opt out, provided the building gets an acceptable evaluation score. Read that carefully: the decision now rests with the association — in practice, your board — and you as an individual owner have no statutory vote on it. A choice that permanently defines your building's fire protection, and materially affects its insurability and value, can now be made without ever going to the owners.

2. Removed publication of your building's score. The prior law required a building's aggregate fire and life safety evaluation score to be published on the Fire Department's website. Ordinance 25-4 deleted that requirement.

3. Removed public disclosure of the opt-out decision. The old rule required the opt-out decision to be made public and posted on the AHJ's website. That's gone too. What remains is "verifiable disclosure" to current and future owners, shareholders, and residents — which the ordinance says "shall include real estate sales disclosures as may be required by Hawaii real estate industry practices."

Take those three together and the practical effect is stark. Your board can now opt your building out of sprinklers without asking you, and neither you nor a prospective buyer can look up the building's score on a government website to see how close to the line it scored. The disclosure obligation still exists — but it has moved from a public register into the private sales-disclosure process. That makes asking the right question, in writing, dramatically more important than it was two years ago. I'll come back to exactly what to ask.

The current deadlines, precisely

For the record, here is the actual compliance schedule under Ordinance 25-4:

• The Fire and Life Safety Evaluation itself was to be conducted by August 31, 2022 — that date has passed. As of the city's April 2026 list, 304 of the 311 buildings have an evaluation on file with the Fire Department.
• By May 3, 2030, each building owner must meet with unit owners (or tenants) to discuss the design plan, financing options, and implementation timeline — and must file a statement of intent to comply with the Fire Department. The department then has 60 days to respond. Buildings choosing sprinklers must file a financial and design plan by the same date.
• By May 3, 2038, the building must comply — an acceptable evaluation score or sprinklers throughout.
• An extension to May 3, 2048 is available to finish sprinklers inside individual units, provided the common-area egress paths are already sprinklered.
• Associations may appeal an evaluation score or the resulting requirements within 45 days, and the department must decide within 30 days.
• Deadlines are tolled if a building permit application sits unprocessed by the city for more than 90 days — a nod to permitting delays that were, fairly, not the associations' fault.

That 2030 meeting requirement is the one to circle. It is the moment the law does still guarantee owners a seat at the table. It is not a vote — but it is a mandatory meeting, and it lands well before the money is committed.

An important caveat about the city's list

The Fire Department's high-rise list tracks whether an evaluation was submitted — not whether the building passed, and not whether it's safe.

Marco Polo itself illustrates the trap: it shows "no" in the evaluation-submitted column. Not because it's non-compliant, but because it installed sprinklers, and a building that sprinklers throughout isn't required to undergo the evaluation at all. A "no" can mean the best outcome or the worst one.

And submission is not passing. When the Council was weighing the extension in October 2024, the Fire Department testified in opposition. Battalion Chief Pao-Chi Hwang told the Council: "We have identified 288 high-rise buildings in Honolulu that are not protected by automatic fire sprinklers, and have not seen an acceptable score in the fire and life safety evaluations. We believe that pushing the timeline for compliance back will not address the safety concerns of these high-rise buildings."

The Council extended the deadline anyway. The change had started as its own standalone bill and ended up folded into the long, technical fire-code update. At the December 2024 meeting where it passed, nobody testified on it.

The part nobody tells buyers: this is really an insurance story

Here's what the ordinance timeline hides. The city's deadline is 2038 — comfortably distant. The insurance deadline can arrive the day after a fire.

A veteran O'ahu condo-insurance broker laid out the math for a board I work with, and it reframes the whole decision. Passing the FLSE — the cheaper, paperwork path — saves you nothing on insurance. In one real case, a building spent $2.3 million on fire-stops to pass the evaluation and got zero premium reduction. Sprinklers, by contrast, cut that building's premium by about 40%. Evaluations satisfy the city. Only sprinklers move the needle with an underwriter.

That is not one insurance broker's idiosyncratic read, either. Sue Savio, president of Insurance Associates Inc. and one of the most quoted condo-insurance voices in the state, has said publicly that monthly insurance costs could roughly halve if sprinklers are installed — and that simply passing the evaluation "won't do anything to the insurance rate because the building's potential damage is still high." On the Council's repeated extensions, her verdict was blunt: "It's only going to get more expensive. It really bothers me that we keep pushing the can down the road."

Now the part that should stop every buyer cold. Carriers are increasingly wary of older, unsprinklered concrete towers. They'll often keep covering a building — until there's a fire. Then the question comes: is the association going to install sprinklers? If the board says no, the carrier non-renews. (That's exactly what happened at Marco Polo — they agreed to sprinklers to stay insured.) Once you're out of the standard market, you land in the secondary market, where premiums run roughly five times higher and deductibles jump to $100,000 or more. One Waikiki building's premium went from about $225,000 to $1.1 million, and its deductible from $25,000 to $250,000.

Spread that across a building, and it stops being an abstraction. A jump of that size on a 100-unit building works out to roughly $700 per unit, per month, added to your maintenance fees — for the two to five years it takes to install sprinklers anyway. For a retiree on a fixed income, that's not an inconvenience. It's the math that prices you out of a home you already own. When you buy into an unsprinklered high-rise, you're not just accepting a life-safety risk — you're accepting that risk's price tag.

What a retrofit actually costs — the real numbers

The objection to sprinklers is always cost, and the figures that circulate are usually guesses. We have better than guesses, because the building at the center of this whole story published its books.

Marco Polo completed its retrofit in October 2021, after roughly two years of construction. The 36-story, 781,165-square-foot building — 568 residential units plus four commercial — spent:

• $5,260,530 on the fire sprinkler retrofit
• $2,197,633 on the fire alarm upgrade
• $625,434 in change orders
• less a $2,000,000 insurance offset toward the alarm work

That's about $6.08 million net — roughly $9,260 per residential unit for sprinklers alone, or about $10,700 per unit all in. On a square-foot basis: $6.73 for sprinklers, $7.79 for the whole project. And critically, all of the work was done with the building fully occupied. No mass displacement of residents.

Smaller buildings don't get that economy of scale. Kahala Towers was estimated at $4-5 million, or about $17,000 to $21,500 per unit. So the honest range for an O'ahu high-rise is roughly $9,000 to $22,000 per unit, with larger towers at the low end.

Set that against the insurance math. If sprinklers cut a premium by 40-50%, and a non-renewal into the secondary market can add ~$700 per unit per month, a $10,000-per-unit retrofit is not the expensive option. It is frequently the cheap one.

Two cost breaks are worth knowing. Honolulu waives the plan review and building permit fees attributable to installing sprinklers in existing high-rise residential buildings erected before 1993 (Ordinance 25-41). And note that year — 1993, not 1975. The city's own fee code recognizes how far past 1975 the unsprinklered stock actually runs.

The second break is one that didn't happen: Council member Andria Tupola's Bill 57 (2024) would have given condo associations a real property tax credit for installing sprinklers. It passed first reading and then languished in committee. It never became law. Today only individual owners can claim a credit — the association, which is the entity that actually writes the seven-figure check, cannot.

Paying for it: the state stepped in, then hit pause

The obvious objection — "who has $5 million lying around?" — got a state-level answer in 2025, and then a complication in 2026.

Act 296 (SLH 2025), signed July 7, 2025, is broader than most owners realize. It does four things at once:

• Reactivates the Hawai'i Hurricane Relief Fund (HHRF) to write hurricane coverage where the private market won't. To qualify, an AOAO must have been denied hurricane coverage by at least two state-licensed insurers and have buildings with total insured value over $10 million. The HHRF coverage is excess only — it covers losses above $10 million, so the association still has to buy primary coverage underneath it. Early results were dramatic: one commercial agent reported associations seeing upwards of 70% savings on the hurricane portion of their premium.
• Expands the Hawai'i Property Insurance Association (HPIA) to offer additional coverage options as a market of last resort.
• Creates the Condominium Association Loan Program at the Hawai'i Green Infrastructure Authority (HGIA).
• Orders the Insurance Commissioner to study long-term market stabilization.

As Representative Scot Matayoshi put it when the bill was signed, the loan piece exists because "the long-term solution is for condominiums to address essential repairs and deferred maintenance, which will help them secure insurance in the future."

The loan program is the piece aimed squarely at sprinklers. Governor Green approved its administrative rules on May 7, 2026, and HGIA launched it days later. Eligible uses explicitly include installing fire sprinklers and other fire-safety upgrades, along with pipe and roof repair. Terms are genuinely usable: up to 20 years, interest-only during construction, a 0.50% origination fee, no prepayment penalty, no personal guarantees, and a minimum 1.15x debt service coverage ratio. Financing can come as a single HGIA loan, an HGIA subordinate loan behind a bank's senior loan, or a participation loan with a Community Development Financial Institution.

Two eligibility catches: an association must first have received at least one adverse-action letter declining a loan from a traditional lender, and must commit to carrying full replacement and hurricane insurance once the work is done. And one cost catch that boards consistently miss — because the fund is capitalized with reimbursable general obligation bonds, Chapter 104 prevailing wage rules apply to any project over $2,000. That is a real line item on a bid, and it should be priced in from the start.

Now the complication. As of this writing, HGIA's website carries this notice:

"The Condominium Association Loan Program is currently on hold. For questions or for condominium associations that were planning to apply for a loan under this program, please contact HGIA... and provide the name of your Association of Apartment Owners (AOAO), type of retrofit (e.g., installing fire sprinklers, replacing pipes, etc.) and the approximate cost of the project."

HGIA has not published a reason, a resumption date, or a description of what happens to applications already in the pipeline. Read alongside the statute — new loan commitments under Act 296 may be made through June 30, 2027, based on funding availability — the most likely explanation is simple arithmetic: the fund is finite, and demand from Hawai'i's aging condo stock is not.

What a board should do about it: do not treat "on hold" as "closed." HGIA is explicitly asking interested associations to write in with their AOAO name, retrofit type, and approximate project cost. That queue is how a program on hold decides what it needs when it restarts, and it costs a board nothing but an email. If your building is anywhere near this decision, get on that list now rather than waiting for an announcement.

"Fires are rare" — what the record actually shows

Every board that debates this hears the same objection, usually said with real conviction: a fire is a one-in-a-million event, and it is irresponsible to spend millions guarding against something that will never happen. I have heard it in my own building's meetings.

It deserves to be taken seriously, because it is a claim about frequency — and frequency is measurable. So I measured it.

The Honolulu Fire Department publishes its incident reports. Between January 2024 and August 2026 — two years and eight months — it publicly reported 20 fires in O'ahu residential high-rises. That is one roughly every 50 days. Nine of them were in buildings sitting on the city's covered list of 311.

Run that against the objection. Nine fires across 311 buildings over 2.7 years is about a 1.1% chance per building, per year. "One in a million" is 0.0001%. The observed rate is more than ten thousand times higher. Over a 30-year hold, the odds that a given covered building sees at least one reported fire are roughly one in four.

And every one of those numbers is a floor, not a total. HFD issues press releases — it does not announce every fire it responds to. The true frequency is higher than anything I can count from public reports.

The buildings, by name

HFD-reported fires in buildings on the city's covered list. Ten are listed here — the nine counted above, plus The Woodrose, which falls just before the January 2024 window and is included for completeness:

Look hard at the two Makaha entries. Those are two different towers of the same condominium project — same tax map key, same association, same master insurance policy — 85 days apart. Whatever "one in a million" describes, it is not that.

Note the build years while you are here. Nuuanu Brookside went up in 1979. Discovery Bay in 1977. The 1975 story does not protect you.

Why your building, not your unit, is the right unit of risk

This is what makes the frequency argument decisive rather than merely interesting.

An owner who says "my unit will never catch fire" is probably right. That is the wrong question. Your master policy, your deductible, and your maintenance fee are all set at the project level. You do not need a fire in your unit to get the carrier's letter. You need a fire in your building — or, as Makaha Valley Towers shows, in the tower next door under the same association.

That is why a roughly 1% annual building-level risk matters far more than a much smaller unit-level one. The financial consequence is shared by every owner in the project, and it lands whether or not the fire was anywhere near your door.

What the reports show about sprinklers

The same archive answers the other question every board asks — whether sprinklers actually do anything. Here is HFD's own wording, incident by incident.

In the sprinklered incidents the story ends in one kitchen, usually with a single sprinkler head, before the first engine arrives. In the unsprinklered ones it becomes a multi-alarm operation. The two 2026 fires below show the contrast at its sharpest.

2026 on O'ahu: two fires, one difference

The argument for sprinklers stopped being theoretical this year. Two Honolulu Fire Department incidents, fifteen weeks apart in the same city, effectively ran the experiment.

On February 21, 2026, a fire started inside a residential unit of the 45-story tower at 1631 Kapiolani Boulevard in Ala Moana. The Fire Department's report is one sentence long in the part that matters: "a small fire within a residential unit was extinguished by the building's sprinkler system." Six units and 26 personnel responded to a fire that was already out. No injuries. That tower is newer construction, sprinklered from the start — but that is precisely the point.

On the night of June 8, 2026, fire broke out in Waipahu Towers, an eight-story apartment building on Pupumomi Street that HFD described as "a non-sprinklered apartment building." The 911 call came in at 10:57 p.m., the first unit arrived at 11:04, and the incident was escalated to a third alarm — 15 units and 49 personnel. Crews found four adults and two infants sheltering in place in smoke-filled apartments on the fire floor and had to assist them out. The fire was not under control until 12:06 a.m. and not fully extinguished until 12:18 a.m. Nobody was hurt, which was a good outcome rather than a guaranteed one.

Same island, same fire department, same year. One fire was over before the engines reached the unit. The other took 49 firefighters, more than an hour, and six people walked out of smoke.

One more wrinkle worth knowing, and it cuts against complacency. Waipahu Towers is not on the city's covered list at all. The retrofit ordinance reaches only residential buildings over 75 feet, and a meaningful share of O'ahu's unsprinklered apartment stock sits below that line, covered by no retrofit requirement whatsoever. The 2038 deadline is not a promise that every unsprinklered residential building on this island will eventually be protected. It applies to the 311 buildings on the city's list, and no further.

Where things stand in 2026 — and what it means for buyers and sellers

As of August 2026, the operative law is the 2021 NFPA 1-based fire code adopted by Ordinance 25-4. No ordinance since has amended the high-rise retrofit provisions. The next hard date is the 2030 planning-and-meeting milestone, then 2038 for compliance, with in-unit work possible until 2048.

Most affected buildings are still leaning toward the evaluation path rather than sprinklers. The Fire Department has never hidden that it considers sprinklers the real answer and the evaluation a compromise — and the insurance market, which does not grant extensions, increasingly agrees.

Waikiki sits at the center of this. Ninety of the 311 buildings on the city's list — 11,098 units — are in the 96815 ZIP code, the largest concentration on the island.

If you own in, or are buying, an older high-rise, this is no longer a back-burner issue. Because the score and the opt-out decision are no longer posted publicly, you now have to ask for them directly. Put these in writing to the board or the seller:

1. Is the building sprinklered, or is it on the city's list of existing high-rise residential buildings? And if it has no full-length interior corridors, does it qualify for the exterior-access exemption entirely?
2. Has the building passed its Fire and Life Safety Evaluation, and what was the score? Not "was it submitted" — passed, and how close to the line. This is no longer on any public website, so you must request it.
3. Has the board already voted to opt out of sprinklers? Since January 2025 it can do this without any owner vote. Ask whether that decision has been made, when, and whether it was disclosed to owners.
4. What's the funding plan — special assessment, HGIA loan (and are you on their contact list while the program is on hold?), or sprinklers — and what happens to dues in a non-renewal scenario?
5. What is the building's current insurance posture — standard market or secondary/surplus lines, what's the deductible, and has any carrier asked about sprinklers at renewal?

The Fire Department's Fire Prevention Bureau and its published high-rise building list will tell you whether a building is covered, when it was built, how many floors it has, and whether it has interior corridors. That list is still public, and current as of April 2026.

What Ordinance 25-4 took off the web is the part you actually want. The building's evaluation score is no longer published on the Fire Department's website, and neither is the fact that a board has opted out. The list tells you a building is in the covered class. It will not tell you whether that building passed, how narrowly, or what its board has already decided. Those are now things you have to ask for rather than look up.

I'm glad to help you read what you find for any specific building. If you're weighing an offer on an older tower, this is worth an hour before you sign, not after.

Sources: Honolulu Fire Department (existing high-rise residential building list, updated April 24, 2026), Revised Ordinances of Honolulu Ch. 20 / NFPA 1 (2021) Sec. 13.3.2.25.2, Ordinances 18-14, 22-2, 25-4 (Bill 55 (2024), CD2) and 25-41, Honolulu City Council Summary of Proposed Committee Draft for Bill 55 (2024) CD1, Resolution 22-245, Bill 57 (2024) (not enacted), Act 296 SLH 2025 (SB 1044) and the Hawaii DCCA Insurance Division, Hawaii Green Infrastructure Authority Condominium Association Loan Program page and product sheet (02/2026), National Fire Sprinkler Association case study on the Marco Polo retrofit (April 2026), Honolulu Fire Department testimony of Battalion Chief Pao-Chi Hwang (October 2024), Honolulu Civil Beat, Hawaii Business Magazine, plus industry insurance figures from a Honolulu condominium-insurance broker and public statements by Sue Savio of Insurance Associates Inc. Also Honolulu Fire Department incident reports for the February 21, 2026 Ala Moana high-rise fire (1631 Kapiolani Boulevard) and the June 8, 2026 three-alarm fire at Waipahu Towers. Fire frequency analysis compiled from the Honolulu Fire Department's published incident reports (fire.honolulu.gov news archive, 956 posts reviewed covering January 2021 through August 21, 2026), cross-matched to HFD's April 24, 2026 existing high-rise residential building list.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or real estate advice. Market conditions change frequently; readers should conduct their own due diligence and consult qualified professionals before making decisions.