If your license is lost, damaged, or―worse―stolen, you can easily obtain a replacement. But you will need to appear at a local driver's license office (see below) in person. When you go, make sure to bring along a couple of documents signifying who you are.

Two forms of identification are necessary: a Social Security card (or something with the number posted on it), and another bearing your name and birth date. The latter can include a certified birth or marriage certificate, military ID card, or alien registration form. There is a $5 fee for a duplicate license.

You can also obtain a replacement license if you had a major growth spurt and shot up a few inches or in the event of a significant weight loss or gain. This is not a necessary option, but you will want to keep your license as close to your identifying features as possible.

Office locations:

• Oahu

• Hawaii (Big Island)

• Kauai

• Maui

Top Travelers

Unfortunately, if you are on the mainland or out of the county when you lose or misplace your license, you can only receive a duplicate without a photo. This does little to help those who need photo identification to hop a plane and come back home. Once you figure out how to get home (such as using secondary ID or a passport), you can head to a local motor vehicle office and obtain a new license.

Top Note on Security

A license that has gone missing in action can send you on a frantic and often futile search of the entire house or car. It leads to phone calls to every place you visited in the past few days and is basically an irritating pain in the neck. Well, you are not alone.

The state issues on average almost 40,000 duplicate licenses a year―a lot of people misplace their license. So the state has taken measures to improve the license itself against counterfeiting. Thus, if you are fretting about someone finding your license and selling modified duplicates to people who aren't you, you can be pretty much rest assured that this is unlikely to occur.

The security features include the addition of the driver's ghost image, a bar code, holograms, an ant-sized state flag, and a funky red line across the top of the license that will give even the best of duplicators fits to recreate.

These measures, along with the fact that you no longer need your Social Security number on the card, pretty much make a lost or stolen license difficult to misuse. If your license was stolen, you do not need to file a police report in order to get a new one―but it might not be a bad idea to report the crime in case someone does try to steal your identity. Plus, if you live on the Big Island, all of the driver's license offices are in police stations, so you can take care of everything at once.

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