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Hawaii liquor licenses are issued by county. Two counties can issue the same license number, so include the issuing county on every Hawaii lookup or search request.
Hawaii coverage is partial. Honolulu and Maui are supported. Hawaii County (Big Island) and Kauai are not supported. A listing for HI in the supported-states API does not mean all Hawaii counties are covered.

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County coverage

Use the issuing county, rather than the business’s mailing city or island name. For Big Island, the recognized county value is hawaii, not big island. The API recognizes all four county names for validation. Recognition does not imply data coverage: queries for Big Island or Kauai currently return no matching data. Do not interpret those results as confirmation that a business is unlicensed.

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Required query parameter

Pass exactly one county value when the state is hi. County names are case-insensitive, and surrounding whitespace is ignored. Numeric county IDs and FIPS codes are not supported. Requests without a county, with a blank or unrecognized county, or with repeated county parameters return 400 validation_error. Other states do not require this parameter; county only scopes Hawaii requests. Your API key must still have access to Hawaii. A supported county does not bypass state access restrictions.

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Retrieve a license

Include the county alongside the state and exact license number. Preserve leading zeros.
The returned object and every entry in its types array belong to the requested county. If the number has no record in that county, the API returns 404 license_not_found. It does not search another county as a fallback.

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Search by name or address

Provide state, county, and exactly one of name or address.
Each search returns up to 10 license objects within that county. A search with no matching records returns 200 with {"data":[]}. To search all currently supported Hawaii counties, issue separate requests for honolulu and maui. There is no statewide Hawaii search or county=all option. Keep each result’s county when combining the responses.

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Update existing callers

If your integration already sends Hawaii requests, add the issuing county before making the request: Do not infer the county from the license number alone. Ask for the issuing county or carry it forward from a previous search result. Include county in your stored identity, cache keys, and deduplication logic for Hawaii. Use (state, address.county, license) for a license object, and include types[].type when identifying an individual type entry. For example, hi / MAUI / 441 and hi / HONOLULU / 441 are different identities. The response structure is unchanged. The returned county is in address.county; the government-issued license number remains in license. Hawaii type identifiers include their county, such as MAUI:PERMANENT, and are separate from the license number.

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Validation error example

Add one valid county parameter and retry. See Retrieve a License, Search, and Errors for the full endpoint behavior.