VehiclesDB

Hawaii license plate: Rainbow

Retired 1991 to 2025. Standard plates for car, van, truck, and bus, issued by The four county directors of finance (City and County of Honolulu; County of Hawaiʻi; County of Maui; County of Kauaʻi), acting under HRS chapter 249. One of 7 Hawaii license plates.

Hawaii (United States) license plate, Rainbow (1991 to 2025), sample ALO 123
Make this plate with your text Download the blank template (SVG) Every Hawaii license plate

Format, years and the law

Format
LLL 999, for example ALO 123 (L is any letter, 9 any digit)

The format above follows the issuing rules: a registration that fits it is one this series could have issued.

Years issued
1991 to 2025. No longer issued.
Vehicle class
Standard: the default series issued to private road vehicles. Issued for car, van, truck, and bus.
Colours
Characters #111111
Size
12 × 6 in (305 × 152 mm) · every country's size
About this plate
THE RAINBOW BASE. The end is HRS § 249-9(a)(1)'s "issued before January 1, 2025". Note also that this series does not stop being relevant at the boundary: Hawaii has no replacement cycle, so rainbow plates without the ʻokina will outnumber ʻokina plates on Hawaii roads for many years, and a parse API should weight accordingly.

Legal basis and sources

  1. § 249-9(a)(1): plates issued BEFORE 1 January 2025 bear 'Hawaii' and 'Aloha State', the statutory END of this series; and the section's history line, which records an amendment by L 1990, c 132, § 2 the year before... https://web.archive.org/web/2024id_/https://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/hrscurrent/Vol04_Ch0201-0257/HRS0249/HRS_0249-0009...
  2. en.wikipedia.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of_Hawaii

Before and after

Hawaii (United States) license plate, Standard (2025 to today) Replaced by Standard 2025 to today

This plate in your app

The series id is us-hi-rainbow-1991. The API returns its format, validation, colours and designs with the rest of Hawaii's series:

curl -s https://vehiclesdb.com/api/v1/plates/us-hi \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VEHICLESDB_API_KEY" \
  | jq '.series[] | select(.id == "us-hi-rainbow-1991")'
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