Kentia palm: brown, crisp leaf tips

What it is likely to be on kentia palm

1. Fertiliser scorch

   Candidate 1common on this plant

   ·source

   Sourced guidancemoderate confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Houseplants — watering and feeding
   • Plant Finder — Missouri Botanical Garden: Houseplant leaf-tip burn

   Checked 2026-08-13

   Damage caused by too much fertiliser rather than too little: brown crisp leaf tips and margins, a white crust on the compost surface or pot rim, and roots that are brown at the tips. It is easily mistaken for underwatering, and watering more makes it worse if the feed continues.

   Points towards it

   • · salts build up gradually from routine feeding and hard tap water, so it appears on a plant whose care has not changed at all
   • · it follows the watering can rather than the weather
   • · every leaf tip is affected together, because every root is in the same compost

   Argues against it

   • · compost that is genuinely dry points at simple thirst, which browns tips for a much more ordinary reason
   • · damage on one aspect of the plant follows sun or a draught rather than what is dissolved in the compost — this rules it out entirely.

   Check this next

   Look at the pot and the compost surface before you look at the leaf tips. A white or yellowish crust on the rim, on the drainage holes or over the compost is accumulated salt, and the tip burn that goes with it has a narrow YELLOW band between the dead brown tip and the green — dry air browns a tip without that halo, and no amount of misting will shift the crust.

   What to do now

   Flush the pot through: stand it in the sink and run water slowly through the compost for several minutes, four or five times the pot's volume, then let it drain fully. Feed at half strength and no more than monthly in the growing season, and use rainwater where you can collect it — trimming the brown tips off with scissors tidies the plant but does nothing about the cause.

   ·source

   Sourced guidancemoderate confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Houseplants — watering and feeding

   Checked 2026-08-13

2. Underwatering

   Candidate 2common on this plant

   ·source

   Sourced guidancemoderate confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Palms as houseplants
   • Plant Finder — Missouri Botanical Garden: Howea forsteriana

   Checked 2026-08-13

   Easier to correct than overwatering and easily confused with it, because a plant short of water and a plant drowning both wilt. The distinguishing observation is not the plant at all — it is the compost, and it takes two seconds to check.

   Points towards it

   • · a root-filled palm pot dries from the middle outward, and water runs down the sides rather than soaking in
   • · the frond tips are furthest from the roots and brown first when supply is short
   • · the oldest, lowest fronds go first while the spear at the centre stays sound

   Argues against it

   • · genuinely wet compost points at the roots failing rather than at not enough water reaching them — this rules it out entirely.

   Check this next

   Lift the pot before and after watering, and push a finger in at the middle rather than the edge. A kentia that has outgrown its pot feels light even when the surface is damp, and the water you gave it appears in the saucer within seconds — that is water running down the gap between root ball and pot, not through the roots. Standing the whole pot in a bucket for twenty minutes and feeling the weight change afterwards settles it.

   What to do now

   Water by immersion rather than from the top: stand the pot in a bucket until bubbles stop, drain it thoroughly, and repeat when the pot feels light. Repot into the next size up in spring if the root ball is solid, and trim browned tips back to just inside the green — palms do not regrow a cut frond tip, so the point is appearance rather than health.

   ·source

   Sourced guidancemoderate confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Palms as houseplants

   Checked 2026-08-13

Narrow it down

This page lists everything at once, which is the right shape for reading and the wrong shape for deciding. The interactive tool asks one question at a time, starting with whichever would separate these causes fastest, and stops as soon as further answers would not help.

Opens with the plant and the symptom already set. Nothing you answer is stored or sent anywhere — the answers live in the address bar and nowhere else.

What this does not cover

These are the causes GrowingHQ holds rules for on kentia palm — not every cause there is. Where several problems look alike, the honest answer is often that they cannot be told apart by eye, and a page that named one would be guessing. If none of the above fits, the general brown, crisp leaf tips page lists causes across all plants, and the Kentia palm profile lists the problems it is prone to.