Hawaii Workforce Trends Spring 2026: Resilient by Choice
If you're running a business in Hawaii right now, you already know it's not always easy. For most, costs are up across every line item. The right hire is harder and harder to find. And the growing economic pressure isn't offering much reassurance. And yet, something is happening that we think is worth paying attention to.
This Spring, we surveyed Hawaii business leaders across all major islands and industries about the state of their businesses. What costs are doing to their operations, how hard it is to find and keep the right worker, where AI actually shows up in their day-to-day, and more. We paired these insights with real payroll data from our own client base to back it all up.
What we found was interesting—half of Hawaii employers described the economy as declining, yet more than half of them said they're confident in their own business growth anyway. That's big. It shows the spirit, the resilience, of Hawaii's business community. The kind that doesn't wait for perfect conditions to move forward.
Keeping this in mind, the rest of the insights help illustrate the state of working in Hawaii, and the resilient mindset business leaders have adopted to forge on.
Here’s a few key takeaways:
Costs are the one thing everyone agrees on.
Rising operating costs landed as the top business challenge in 2026 by a wide margin. It held across industries, company sizes, and islands. No one was exempt. We see it in our client data too, and it's shaping nearly every workforce decision employers are making right now.
Hawaii's hiring challenge is different from the rest of the country.
Job openings are cooling on the mainland. Hawaii employers are telling a different story. The challenge isn't just finding applicants. It's finding the people who are ready for the role, or willing to grow into it and stay.
Retention is becoming a strategy, not an afterthought.Â
When hiring is this hard, keeping the people you already have becomes one of the most important moves you can make. 54% of Hawaii businesses are betting on company culture to keep workers, making it the top retention strategy in use right now. Watch our webinar on building culture and retaining talent in Hawaii to learn more.
Employers are more confident in their own businesses than in the economy around them.
We've tracked this across three survey waves now, and business confidence has climbed 19 points since Spring 2025. The gap keeps widening. That's the resilience story, and we think it's the most important thing in this report.
Most employers have started using AI. Very few have scaled it.
Adoption is happening across businesses of all sizes. But most haven't moved past the early stages. The jump from starting to operationalizing is where most employers told us they feel stuck.
Cybersecurity is on the radar. Action is lagging.
67% of employers told us they have meaningful cybersecurity work to do in 2026. Most haven't started yet. Naming the gap, it turns out, is the first step. Read more about it here.
Want the full picture?
Every one of these findings goes deeper in the report. The data, the context, and what it means for your business.
We published this report because we believe Hawaii's business community makes better decisions with better data. The findings come from your peers, on your islands, navigating the same year you are. If any of it resonates with where your business stands right now, the full report is free to download.
