Free Hawaii Liability Waiver Form

Hawaii is one of the few states where the legislature, not the courts, decided what a recreational waiver can do. HRS section 663-1.54 tells any business that sells recreational activities to the public that it must use reasonable care and answers in damages for its own negligence, and then allows a signed release to cover one thing: the inherent risks of the activity, and only if the business discloses those risks and screens and instructs the customer first. Courts applying that text have said the release cannot reach the operator's own negligence. So the familiar paragraph promising that the customer gives up all claims does not end a lawsuit here.

That does not make the document pointless, and this page explains what it is actually for in Hawaii: the risk disclosure the statute demands, the screening and instruction record, the consent and medical authorisation, and the proof that the customer was told about the waiver before paying. What follows is general information and not legal advice, so use it to prepare questions for a Hawaii attorney rather than to answer them without one. Everything below traces to a statute or a decision linked at the bottom of the page.

How Hawaii treats liability waivers

Section 663-1.54 has three subsections and they work together. Subsection (a) states the duty: a person who owns or operates a business providing recreational activities to the public, listed by example as scuba or skin diving, sky diving, bicycle tours and mountain climbing, must exercise reasonable care for the safety of patrons and the public and is liable for damages resulting from negligent acts or omissions that cause injury. Subsection (b) creates the exception: notwithstanding subsection (a), the operator is not liable for injuries resulting from inherent risks if the patron voluntarily signs a written release waiving liability for those inherent risks, and no waiver is valid unless the operator first gives full disclosure of the inherent risks and takes reasonable steps to ensure that each patron is physically able to participate and is given the instruction needed to participate safely. Subsection (c) defines an inherent risk as a danger a reasonable person would understand to be part of the activity by its very nature, one that would persist despite the operator's reasonable care and is generally beyond the operator's control, and one that does not result from the operator's negligence, gross negligence or wanton act or omission. It also assigns the inherent or not question to the trier of fact.

Read together, those provisions leave a recreational operator with a release that covers only the risks nobody could have prevented. Two decisions say so directly. In King v. CJM Country Stables, a horseback riding case in which a horse bit a rider, the District of Hawaii applied the statute even though neither side had cited it, held that section 663-1.54(a) explicitly precludes waiving liability for negligence, and treated the release paragraph as void to that extent. In September 2025 the Intermediate Court of Appeals reached the same conclusion in McKellar v. Outfitters Kauai, where a passenger slipped while getting off a tour boat. The court held that the plain language of the section precludes a waiver of the operator's liability for negligence, quoted the 1997 committee report saying that inherent risk waivers do not extend immunity for damages resulting from negligence, and added that subsection (c) creates a statutory question of fact that defeats summary judgment on the strength of a release.

There is a real complication, and a Hawaii business should know about it. The Hawaii Supreme Court has never construed section 663-1.54. In Courbat v. Dahana Ranch the court considered a ranch waiver signed by riders who had prepaid their tour, described exculpatory contracts as permitted when knowingly and willingly made, applied the public interest factors from Krohnert v. Yacht Systems Hawaii, concluded that recreational tours do not implicate the public interest, and held that the waiver would cover the negligence claims if the booking practice was not deceptive. The statute is not mentioned anywhere in the opinion. McKellar is a summary disposition order rather than a published opinion, and King is a federal prediction of state law. So the direction of travel is clear but the top court has not spoken.

Outside recreation the common law still governs. Fujimoto v. Au restates the Hawaii rule that parties may make exculpatory contracts when they do so knowingly and willingly, and that such a clause is void only if it violates a statute, runs against a substantial public interest, or was obtained through inequality of bargaining power. A commercial services contract, an equipment rental between businesses, or an indemnity between a venue and a vendor is judged by that test, not by section 663-1.54. Operators who run tours from a vessel have a further wrinkle: in Ehart v. Lahaina Divers the Ninth Circuit reversed an order striking a waiver defence in a scuba fatality case and expressly left open whether federal admiralty law preempts the Hawaii statute in that setting.

Waivers signed for minors in Hawaii

The statute is silent about children. It speaks of a patron who voluntarily signs a written release and says nothing about parents, guardians or anyone signing for someone else, and no Hawaii appellate decision has settled whether a parent can give up a child's future negligence claim. That question is genuinely open in Hawaii.

For a recreational operator, though, the open question is not the one that matters. Since the statute keeps the operator liable for its own negligence whoever holds the pen, a parent cannot hand over more than the child could have. The guardian block on the form earns its place for other reasons: it records consent to participation, gives emergency medical authorisation, confirms the child's age, weight or ability where the activity has limits, and proves that the family received the risk disclosure the statute requires.

Two timing rules deserve a place in your record keeping policy. HRS section 657-13 allows a person who was under eighteen when the claim accrued to sue after the disability is removed, so a seven year old hurt on a tour may still file well into the next decade. And if a claim is settled later, money or property belonging to the minor can require a conservator or another protective order under HRS section 560:5-401 before an adult may manage it. Keep the signed form, the risk disclosure version, the briefing log and any photographs for as long as those periods run.

What the waiver must say to hold up in Hawaii

Hawaii does not have a typography rule of the sort other states apply. It has a content rule and a timing rule, and both are harder to satisfy than bold capitals.

The content rule is section 663-1.54(b). Full disclosure of the inherent risks means the risks of your activity at your site, written so a first time visitor understands them: the current at that beach, the reef, the boat ladder in swell, the mule's temperament, the altitude on the crater trail, what happens if a rider drops the handlebar. A generic paragraph about the dangers of outdoor recreation is not disclosure of anything. The same subsection requires reasonable steps on physical ability and instruction, so the form should carry a health and ability question the customer answers in writing, and the business should run and log an actual briefing. Ehart shows why this is worth the trouble: the Ninth Circuit let the dive operator keep its waiver defence because whether full disclosure had been given and reasonable steps taken was a live question of fact rather than something the plaintiff had disproved.

The timing rule comes from Courbat. The riders there booked and paid through an internet activity company, arrived at the ranch and were handed a waiver at check-in. The Supreme Court adopted the federal Cliffdale Associates test for a deceptive practice under HRS section 480-2, held that whether the failure to mention the waiver requirement during booking was material to a reasonable consumer was for the trier of fact, and pointed out that a deceptive omission would void the underlying contract and the waiver under section 480-12. The fix costs nothing. Say on the booking page, in the confirmation email and in the terms you give any travel agent or activity desk that every participant signs a waiver, and offer the text in advance. Courbat also noted approvingly that the riders had time to read the form and knew they were giving up rights, so do not present the document in a queue thirty seconds before departure.

Gross negligence and what a Hawaii waiver cannot cover

Nothing the operator does wrong can be released in advance. Subsection (c)(3) removes from the definition of an inherent risk any danger that results from the negligence, gross negligence, or wanton act or omission of the owner or operator, and an inherent risk is the only category subsection (b) allows a release to reach. The common law points the same way: Courbat construed the ranch's broad language narrowly because exculpatory provisions are disfavoured, limited it to simple negligence, and said it did not protect the ranch against its own gross negligence or wilful misconduct. Hawaii's equine statute repeats the pattern, since HRS section 663B-2 gives sponsors a rebuttable presumption for injuries caused solely by the inherent and unpredictable nature of the horse while preserving liability for faulty tack, for failing to match horse and rider, for failing to supervise, for latent dangerous conditions and for gross negligence or wilful or wanton disregard for safety. In Courbat the presumption did not apply at all, because the claim was that the guide had failed to supervise.

What survives for the defence is the statutory assumption of inherent risk in subsection (b), the disclosure record that proves the customer accepted those risks, and Hawaii's comparative negligence statute. Under HRS section 663-31 a participant's own carelessness does not bar recovery unless it is greater than the defendant's, and the damages are reduced by the participant's share, with the percentages found by the jury or by the court in a bench trial. The Intermediate Court of Appeals reminded the circuit court of exactly that procedure in McKellar. Rules the customer agreed to, warnings the customer acknowledged, a refusal log and a careful incident report are the evidence that moves those percentages, so they are worth more to a Hawaii operator than any release paragraph.

Electronic signatures in Hawaii

Hawaii adopted the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act in 2000 as chapter 489E. Section 489E-7 provides that a record or signature may not be denied legal effect or enforceability solely because it is in electronic form, that a contract may not be denied effect because an electronic record was used in its formation, and that an electronic record satisfies a law requiring a writing while an electronic signature satisfies a law requiring a signature. Section 489E-9 attributes an electronic record or signature to a person if it was that person's act, provable in any manner, including by showing the efficacy of the security procedure used to identify the signer.

Section 489E-5 carries a Hawaii specific trap worth reading before you design a kiosk flow. The chapter applies only between parties who have each agreed to conduct transactions electronically, judged from context and conduct, and the agreement to transact electronically may not be contained in a standard form contract that is not itself an electronic record, except in a separate and optional agreement whose primary purpose is to authorise electronic dealing. It also may not be inferred solely from the fact that someone paid or registered a purchase online. In practice that means a clear, separate consent step in the signing flow rather than a line buried in a paper form at the counter.

Remember what the chapter does not do. It governs the form of the record, so an electronically signed release is exactly as limited by section 663-1.54 as an ink one. Its real value in Hawaii is evidentiary: the timestamped record shows which version of the risk disclosure this customer read, when they read it relative to booking and departure, how they answered the health and ability questions, and that they saw the waiver requirement before they paid. That is the material the statute and Courbat actually reward.

How to use this form in Hawaii

Download the Word template and edit it into a Hawaii document. Replace the bracketed placeholders with your business name, the activity, the location and Hawaii as the governing law. Then rebuild the middle of the form: expand the risk section until it names the real hazards of your site and activity, add the health, ability and experience questions you will actually screen on, add a line confirming the safety briefing was given and by whom, and keep the medical authorisation and the guardian block. Leave the release clause in place if your attorney advises, and make it say that it covers the inherent risks of the activity and does not release gross negligence, recklessness or intentional conduct, with a severability clause so one bad sentence does not take the rest down. Be straight with your staff about what it does. For a recreational activity in Hawaii, that paragraph will not end a negligence suit, and telling a customer otherwise after an injury is the kind of statement that shows up in a complaint.

To run it online, rebuild the same content as a Waiver.com template: the risk disclosures as separate blocks with an acknowledgement for each, the health and ability questions as required fields, a consent step for signing electronically, and participant and guardian signatures. Publish it as a version, send the link with the booking confirmation so the customer meets the waiver before they pay, and keep the completed records past the two year period in HRS section 657-7 and well beyond it for anyone who signed for a child. Used that way, the form does the job Hawaii law leaves it: it proves what you disclosed, what you checked and what the customer knew, which is the evidence that matters when the release itself cannot carry the defence. Have a Hawaii attorney review the finished document before you put it in front of customers.