Waikiki Beach shark attacks

unprovoked bites on record in Hawaii in 2025

None of them were fatal.

The International Shark Attack File lists 4 unprovoked bites in Hawaii in 2025, along its whole coast.

Unprovoked bites are extremely rare. The International Shark Attack File confirmed 65 of them worldwide in 2025, in line with the 2020–2024 average of about 61 a year — that is every coast on earth, for a whole year.

The file puts the lifetime odds of dying in a shark-related incident in the United States at 1 in 4,332,817. For a lightning strike it puts them at 1 in 79,746. Its own odds table.

What the number counts

The number counts unprovoked bites: in the file's words, a bite on a live human in the shark's natural habitat with no human provocation. Bites that happen while somebody is handling a shark, or unhooking one, are counted separately as provoked and are not in this number.

The file publishes this total for Hawaii as a whole, not beach by beach, so it covers every mile of coast in it over that year — not Waikiki Beach on its own.

How the record is kept

One year is one year. A quiet season is not a promise and a busy one is not a trend — the file counts afresh every year, and its own summary notes that swings from year to year are expected.

A published total is not a census. The file is a compilation built from the reports that reached it — its own director notes that a significant fraction of incidents likely go unreported — and it is still documenting cases from decades past, so the early years are thinner than the recent ones.

Read from the International Shark Attack File, Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, on August 20, 2026.

What this page is not

None of this says anything about today. A count reaching back more than a century is a record, not a reading of the water in front of you.

Warm water says nothing about surf, rip currents, or bacteria — check local lifeguard flags and advisories.

Looking for the water instead? Waikiki Beach water temperature.