Pritchardia maideniana is an unbranched tree that can grow up to 9(–21) meters tall. The stems feature smooth, grayish trunks that are 15–30.5 cm in diameter. The leaves are simple, with a crown typically containing twenty to thirty ascending, spreading, and sometimes drooping leaves, each 91–122 cm long and wide. Often, a prominent skirt of old, dead, persistent leaves conceals the upper part of the trunk. The leaf blades are conspicuously wavy and folded, diamond-shaped, with surfaces that are dull to (rarely) nearly powdery grayish-green above and below. The margins are deeply divided, to one-half or slightly more, into fifty to sixty segments, which are occasionally droopy-tipped but mostly stiff-tipped. The veins are parallel, and the petioles are 91–122 cm long, sparsely to moderately covered along the edges at the base with hair-like fibers. Stipules are absent. The flowers and fruit stalks have up to five relatively short primary branches shorter than or about equal to the leaf stalks. When heavily laden, the fruit stalks hang below the leaves, nestling against the skirt of dead, old, persistent leaves. The rigid, slender to thick flower and fruit branchlets are up to 10 cm long and mostly hairless. 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 shiny, brownish to black, and spherical, nearly 2.5 cm in diameter when mature. 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 coastal areas, often in brackish water ponds near sea level and in dry to moist forests between 0–700 meters.