Most public employees across Hawaiʻi pull down similar salaries for similar jobs once you drop below the ranks of executives and other leaders. But wages for some county-level positions can depend on which island you live on, adding to the challenges government faces in filling chronic vacancies.

One standout, given the entrenched challenges facing Honolulu’s Department of Planning and Permitting, are salaries for Building Plans Examiners. Kauaʻi County pays a Building Plans Examiner II $73,428, while in Honolulu they are paid just $58,008.

Salary levels can vary across other county departments as well, according to compensation data obtained from local government for Civil Beat’s latest salary database update.

A Land Surveyor IV working for Hawaiʻi County earns $95,022, nearly $6,000 more than if they were working in Honolulu. A Human Resources Specialist III on Oʻahu earns $72,180 compared to $87,864 on Kauaʻi. The starting pay for a Victim/Witness Counselor in Honolulu is $59,535, compared to $72,180 on the Big Island.

The counties acknowledge those wage gaps can’t be ignored in the current job market.

Honolulu’s permitting department director Dawn Apuna told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser last fall that pay was her biggest hurdle in addressing staff shortages.

“People won’t even come for an interview just knowing what the salary range is,” she said.

Honolulu’s Director of Human Resources Nola Miyasaki told Civil Beat via email that while the city was making progress modernizing its recruitment and retention practices, it was also engaging in “active discussions with local unions to set competitive wages.”

County personnel departments have been in hiring mode, the most recent state economic data show, making a total of 400 new hires by the end of the second quarter of this year — a 2% increase compared to the same time in 2024.

A majority of those new hires won’t see dramatic raises anytime soon either. Increases of between 2% and 4% were negotiated this year by unions, even as recent salary hikes for Maui County directors, deputy director and elected officials set new benchmarks for Hawaiʻi public executive salaries.

More: Recent Government Salary Hikes At The Top Leave Many Public Workers Behind

That’s leading counties like Hawaiʻi and Honolulu to get creative by establishing recruitment task forces, holding recruitment events, and by turning to expanded employee benefits, stipends and other incentives to attract and retain staff.

Kauaʻi County gained the most workers by percentage in the past 12 months, adding 100 positions to bring its workforce up to around 1,500.

The Garden Isle’s incentives include “free medical coverage for employees and their families, and supplemental agreements for hard-to-fill positions across critical areas, including Kauaʻi Police Dispatch, engineering, DMV operations, liquor enforcement, and parks and recreation,” county spokesman Alden Alayvilla said in an email.

The City and County of Honolulu also added around 100 positions, although that represented less than a percentage point increase of its current workforce of less than 11,000. Hiring has dramatically increased compared to before the COVID-19 pandemic, Miyasaki said, with 46% more employees hired in the 2024-2025 fiscal year compared to the 2019-2020 fiscal year. The city is also ramping up leadership and management training in anticipation of pending retirements.

The round of new hires brought Hawaiʻi’s local government workforce at the end of June to 19,300, the highest it has been since 1990, according to the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. Maui County currently has 2,900 employees, the highest number in its history, county spokesperson Laksmi Abraham said.

Despite that hiring surge, counties still face staff shortages of up to 30% or more in many service areas, with law enforcement and infrastructure-related jobs particularly hard hit, according to information counties provided Civil Beat in response to public records requests.

Labor Costs Weighing On Small Government

Even accounting for federal workforce cuts under the Trump administration, there was an overall net gain in government sector jobs in Hawaiʻi in the first half of the year. State jobs increased by 700, or 1%, while county jobs grew by an average of 3%.

County government salaries in the state also grew by 5.9% last year, a higher rate than for government workers overall of 5.3% and above the 5% increases in annual wages of all workers in Hawaiʻi.

Statewide salary data from DBEDT shows workers employed by Hawaiʻi’s counties earned on average $85,137 in 2024 — $19,137 more than the average Hawaiʻi state government worker and $20,303 more than the average salary in the private sector. Those figures don’t include the cost of benefits.

Salaries are increasingly creating challenges for the budgets of small cities, according to the results of the most recent survey of fiscal city conditions by the National League of Cities.

“As labor costs increase, city leaders are navigating new fiscal challenges that have direct implications for budgeting and long-term financial planning,” the NLC report found.

In assessing executive salaries to keep them competitive, Maui County’s salary commission engaged consultants from MGT Consulting, a company that provides advisory services to state and local governments. 

The company prepared a compensation study for director and deputy salaries and a range of recommendations on how to bring wages into line with those in other local governments of similar size. MGT’s report said that direct comparisons of many jobs are difficult because roles can differ depending on the size of the county workforce. 

In small counties, employees can be asked to “wear many hats,” the report said. 

The consultants used a point system to identify cities or city-county entities on the mainland United States with populations between 120,000 and 400,000 with similar income-per-capita, local government salary expenditure and full-time equivalent employees to benchmark salaries for Maui. 

The jurisdictions including Boise, Idaho; Spokane, Washington; Tempe, Arizona and Fort Collins, Colorado.

The most recent salary data for Fort Collins, excluding hourly workers, showed the average salary there was around $91,000, or $6,000 more than the $85,000 average county salary in Hawaiʻi.

Vacancies Hit Infrastructure, Public Works

The County of Hawaiʻi reported 643 vacancies, or around 22% of its total budgeted workforce –– the highest by percentage of all the state’s counties –– according to the its Department of Human Resources. 

County spokesman Tom Callis said a task force established in January is working to reduce that number.

All of the counties face similar challenges in filling first responder vacancies, where most salaries are synchronized under union contracts with the Hawaiʻi Firefighters Association and the State of Hawaiʻi Organization of Police Officers.

The base salary range for a fire captain as of July 1 is between $82,958 and $124,114. The range for a police captain is between $69,060 and $98,328, excluding overtime, conduct and retention bonuses.

The Big Island reported that it was looking for 113 sworn and non-sworn police personnel, almost 20% of the budgeted force of over 600, and 60 firefighters.

But first responders were not the only sought-after positions. The Department of Parks and Recreation needed 57 workers, and there were 96 vacancies in the county’s Department of Water Supply. 

A Park Maintenance Supervisor IV earns up to $71,772, and a Water Treatment Plant Operator II for the Dept. of Water Supply earns $75,600 a year.

The county’s Public Works Department was looking for 61 staff, including planning inspectors, with a wide salary range for those currently serving in Planning Inspector II positions, from $59,196 to $87,660. A similar range exists for Animal Control, with 16 vacancies. A protection officer there makes as little as $64,428 and as much as $91,728. 

Shortages showed up in some higher salary ranges on the Big Island, too, including 22 vacancies in the Office of the Prosecuting Attorney, where a deputy prosecuting attorney is paid between $118,212 and $165,000.

Pattern Of Vacancies Statewide

Maui County was not far behind Hawaii County, with 622 Civil Service positions unfilled — around 21% of its workforce of about 2,900, according to Lois Whitney, deputy communications director for the mayor’s office.

The number of police and fire vacancies on Maui are almost the same as on the Big Island, but the rate of Maui police vacancies is 5 percentage points lower. Maui Police Department has 167 vacancies out of 635 personnel, and Maui Fire and Public Safety has 64 vacancies out of 516.

Current Maui County salaries could not be verified because the county has not yet provided full updated salary data to Civil Beat.

Outside of first responders, the county’s Department of Parks and Recreation has 72 vacancies, including for a Park Caretaker II who earns $57,696, according to their recruitment website. There also are 55 vacancies in its public works department including for an Electrician Helper, who makes $58,308 a year. 

Maui County’s Office of the Corporation Counsel is down by a dozen staff. 

Abraham said however that vacancies in the county workforce have been reduced by 30% since January 2023, and about 200 additional positions have been added in response to community needs.

Vacancies followed a similar pattern elsewhere. At the end of November, there were 2,281 permanent civil service vacancies in the City and County of Honolulu — 20% of the 10,797 authorized permanent positions —according to city spokesman Scott Humber.

Honolulu Police Department has been operating with 465 uniform vacancies, 21% a budgeted total of 2,170, and 189 civilian positions also need to be filled.

A recently approved contract with SHOPO will see salaries for most uniformed roles increase by 27% for HPD and other county departments over the next four years. A recent report from a Honolulu City Council task force has also recommended $500-a-month housing stipends and referral bonuses to bring HPD in line with mainland departments of comparable size.

Kauaʻi County had 161 civil service and two non-civil service positions or just over 10% vacant out of a total workforce of 1,500, Reiko Matsuyama of the mayor’s office said in an email.

Counties in other states have looked at expanding their use of contracted workers to fill longtime vacancies, said Joe Kent, executive vice president of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaiʻi.

While Hawaiʻi’s strict civil service laws make it more difficult for counties to use contract workers to fill roles traditionally carried out by local government employees, Kent said, it’s time for a broader discussion about whether contracting could be a way to address chronic vacancies. There may also be a case for eliminating the positions that have been empty for a long time as a cost-saving measure, he said.

Randy Pereira, executive director Hawaii Government Employees Association, the union that represents more than half of all state and local government workers was not available to respond to Kent’s comments or the vacancy issues in general.

Civil Beat reporter Caitlin Thompson contributed to this story.

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by a grant from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.