The hairpin completion is an operation on formal languages which is inspired
by the hairpin formation in biochemistry. Hairpin formations occur naturally
within DNA-computing. It has been known that the hairpin completion of a
regular language is linear context-free, but not regular, in general. However,
for some time it is was open whether the regularity of the hairpin completion
of a regular language is is decidable. In 2009 this decidability problem has
been solved positively by providing a polynomial time algorithm. In this paper
we improve the complexity bound by showing that the decision problem is
actually NL-complete. This complexity bound holds for both, the one-sided and
the two-sided hairpin completions