Pritchardia kaalae is a moderate-sized palm that can grow up to 5 meters tall. The stems have smooth, gray trunks that are 15 to 25 cm in diameter. The leaves are simple, forming a spherical crown with up to twenty ascending, spreading to drooping leaves. The blades are approximately 122 cm long and wide, slightly wavy, dark green above and below, and deeply divided to nearly one-half into as many as sixty droop-tipped segments. The surfaces are almost concolorous, waxy-glaucous to pale green, with the lower surface having a few scattered, pale-colored, unequal, punctiform, or very narrowly linear, rusty scales. The blades are thin and chartaceous or thick and coriaceous. Veins are parallel, and the petioles can reach up to 152 cm, with only a few fibers along the edges at the base. Stipules are absent. The inflorescences are composed of one or more panicles with glabrous, spreading, very slender (1 mm in diameter) rachillae that are zigzag-sinuous between the flowers. The bracteoles are extremely fine and setiform. The prophyll and peduncular bracts are 3–5, scarcely lepidote, usually glabrate, imbricate, tubular in the lower part, and suddenly expanded into deeply concave, mule-ear-like, rigid, chartaceous, quickly glabrous, short-acuminate blades. The flowers are bisexual (perfect) and sessile. The calyx is cupular, shallowly 3-lobed, prominently nerved, or smooth when dry. The corolla consists of 3 petals, adnate basally to the staminal filament tube to about the height of the calyx, with distinct lobes that are valvate in bud, caducous as the flower expands, prominently pocketed and furrowed within, and prominently nerved when dry. There are six stamens; the filaments are flattened, thickish, connate basally into a tube equaling or exceeding the calyx and surrounding the carpels, then distinct and abruptly subulate, not inflexed at the apex. The anthers are erect in bud, dorsifixed, spreading-erect to versatile at anthesis, oblong in outline, bifid basally nearly to the point of insertion, with an emarginate apex and a narrow connective. The anther sacs dehisce longitudinally and laterally. The ovary is superior, with three carpels, typically only one maturing, coherent only basally. The ovules are 1 per carpel, with broad-based styles connate above into a trigonous column tapering to a shallowly trifid stigma. The ovules are anatropous, erect, and attached at the base of the placenta. The fruit is globose when fully grown yet not mature, measuring 2 cm in diameter. The seeds are distinct from the endocarp except at the hilum, shiny, with homogeneous endosperm except for a shallow invagination of the seed coat below the raphe. The embryo is lateral near the base opposite the raphe. It occurs in mesic valley floors, slopes, and cliffs on the north side of Mount Ka’ala and in the open, windswept mesic forest on Makua-Makaha ridge between 450 – 980 meters.