The main village is Otepa, and the population was 1,066 inhabitants in the 2012 census,[4] with a strong demographic increase since the establishment of the Pacific Experimentation Center (CEP) base for nuclear testing.

The Catholic Church began its activity in the region in the 19th century and has a religious building in the area called St. Peter's Church (Église de Saint-Pierre),[5] located in Otepa, the largest town on the island and attached to the Metropolitan Archdiocese of Papeete with headquarters on the island of Tahiti.The first recorded European arriving on Hao was Pedro Fernández de Quirós on 10 February 1606.

In the late-1980s, two French intelligence (DGSE) operatives were briefly confined to the military base on the island after France obtained their release from a New Zealand prison for sinking the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior.

Its 3.46 km (2.15 mi) runway was to be a designated Transoceanic abort landing sites for the Space Shuttle, had it taken on flight operation from the Vandenberg launch facility, which never came to be.

The infrastructures built during these years are numerous: a major airfield with a 3,380 m runway (classified by NASA as an emergency landing strip in case of a technical problem with the space shuttle Columbia), a cargo port, a 15 km road, desalination units, electric generators and a hospital.

Since 2000, the atoll's private sector activities have been mainly related to pearl farming, fishing (with the export to Tahiti of about ten tons of seafood per year)[11] and copra harvesting.

The French Polynesian government supports the project, which has been five years in the making, and which, according to its promoter, should allow the theoretical creation of nearly three hundred jobs during the thirty months of construction, and five hundred jobs (90% of which should be attributed to Polynesians)[13] from the start of operations, allowing the diversification of the economic activity of the atoll, depopulated since the withdrawal of the French army.

[17] The municipality also hosts a secondary school for the children of the southern Tuamotu and Gambier atolls, as well as, for the past few years, the Center for Education in Appropriate Technologies for Development (CETAD), a vocational training institute specialized in sea-related professions.

Finally, the landing of the Natitua submarine cable and its commissioning in December 2018 allows Hao to be connected to Tahiti and to the global high-speed Internet.