Maui Wildfire Settlement Payout Date: $1.1 Billion Is Sitting in Trust for 21,750 Claimants, and Not a Dollar Moves Until the Hawaii Supreme Court Rules on a $222 Million Fee Fight It Heard on September 15

Three years after the August 8, 2023 fire that killed 102 people and destroyed most of Lahaina, the settlement itself is done. The global deal — $4.037 billion as Hawaii media report it, $4.039 billion in Hawaiian Electric’s own announcement — is paid by Hawaiian Electric, the State of Hawaii, Kamehameha Schools, Maui County, Spectrum Oceanic, Hawaiian Telcom and affiliates of West Maui Land Co. It was reached in August 2024, papered in agreements dated November 1, 2024, and cleared its last legal condition on April 10, 2026, when the judgment against more than 200 insurers' subrogation claims became final. That same day Hawaiian Electric authorized the first of four equal annual installments of $479 million, drawn from money it had raised in a September 2024 equity offering and parked in a special-purpose vehicle. (The utility’s total share is $1.99 billion; the difference is the $75 million it had already put into the state’s One ʻOhana fund for deaths and serious injuries.) Local reporting puts the amount now held in trust for the first distribution at about $1.1 billion.

What stopped it is a fee order. On June 5, 2026, Maui Circuit Judge Peter Cahill capped what individual lawyers may take from their clients' recoveries and set aside $222 million as a common-benefit fund for the firms that did the work that benefited everyone. Three firms — Ranken & Shnider of Wailuku, PacLaw Group of Honolulu and Montegna & Thickstun of Wailuku — and a Lahaina survivor who lost his home, Michael Adrian Kahaleala Bates, appealed. The appeal was filed July 2 with the Intermediate Court of Appeals and transferred to the Hawaii Supreme Court on August 5. While it is pending, as The Garden Island and the Star-Advertiser have reported, no settlement payments can be made. That is the whole of the delay: not the utility, not the state, not the administrators — a dispute among the plaintiffs' own lawyers over how the pie is cut.

Judge Cahill's June order replaced the contingency contracts that survivors signed — Hawaii law allows up to 25 percent — with a schedule tied to when a lawyer was retained:

The lawyers had sought roughly $1 billion in fees. Cahill's own language about how the case arrived at settlement was not gentle — the global settlement, he wrote, “launched itself on a meander that emptied into a swamp of Stygian proportions” — and lead counsel Jesse Creed's response was that “the residents are doing the biggest sacrifice of all.” The appellants' position, argued by Samuel Shnider, is that the judge had no authority to rewrite private fee contracts at all: “This order is tort reform from the bench. The fee order must be vacated.” Their filing describes the court's role under the settlement agreement as “transactional and finite — approve the settlement, approve the administrator, and approve the plan.” Liaison counsel Cynthia Wong told the court the order “was appropriate and based on finding a balance” between lawyers and victims drawing from a limited fund.

The court heard slightly over an hour of argument on Tuesday, September 15, 2026, before a five-member panel: Acting Chief Justice Sabrina McKenna, Associate Justices Todd Eddins and Lisa Ginoza, and Circuit Judges Kevin Morikone and Taryn Tomasa sitting as substitute justices. McKenna, Eddins and Ginoza pressed both sides on the case law and statutes; McKenna asked directly whether Cahill's order would limit the appellants' own fees, and Shnider confirmed that it would. A third lawyer, Lance Collins, agreed with the appellants on one point but proposed a different remedy.

No ruling was issued from the bench. The expectation that has been reported — and it should be read as exactly that, an expectation from one side's counsel — is Wong's: if the court rules later this month, settlement payments “may finally start going to victims by October.” A survivor quoted by Hawaii News Now in July, Marina Starleaf Riker, put the other view: “I wish that everyone involved would stop making promises they can't keep.” The record supports her caution. Payments were reported as possible “as soon as April” in March, as facing a “yearslong wait” in April, as “poised for first payout” in June, and as “delayed again” in August.

There is no claim form and no settlement website of the kind that class actions use. Every claimant is an individual plaintiff represented by counsel; the claims were filed through the lawyers. By June 2026 the count stood at 21,750 claimants, 94,816 claims, 215,000 supporting documents, across ten categories: real and personal property, living expenses, wage loss, business loss, emotional distress from displacement and from being in the “zone of danger,” physical injury and wrongful death. Four administrators value the claims — Honolulu mediator Keith Hunter, retired California judges Daniel Buckley and Louis Meisinger, and Cathy Yanni, who as trustee distributed the $13.7 billion California wildfire fund — and awards are pro rata to the severity of loss, paid in tranches as each annual installment arrives.

Two numbers put the scale in perspective. Civil Beat's arithmetic on the June filings works out to an average of about $190,000 per claimant across the four years, roughly $47,000 a year — an average, not a floor, in a distribution that runs from a lost car to a lost family. And the zone-of-danger category alone has 16,472 claims in three tiers of $200,000, $100,000 and $50,000; at the lowest tier that category would absorb about $823 million, a fifth of the entire settlement, before a single house is paid for. The combined claims, by liaison counsel Wong’s account to the court, total $12 billion to $15 billion against a $4.037 billion fund. Whatever the Supreme Court decides about fees changes the margin, not the shortfall.

The fee ruling is the last gate before the first tranche. If the order is affirmed, the administrators' allocations can be paid from the $1.1 billion in trust net of the capped fees; if it is vacated, the fee question presumably goes back to the circuit court — and the money waits again. We will update this page when the court rules. Until then, the only accurate answer to “when” is: after the ruling, and at the earliest in October.