Where will $49.6 billion
of your money go?

What shaped this budget

Colorado’s mix differs from the 50-state average most on higher education — 15.9% of its spending against 8.8% across all states, a gap of +7.1 points. FACT Basis: self-reported expenditures, fiscal 2025 NASBO estimate — not this year’s enacted appropriation. Neither a rank nor a per-resident figure is derived on this basis: NASBO publishes shares only.

Open the budget in detail→

The corrections log

41 corrections since 11 July. The most recent was 5 September 2026. The three newest are below; the full log is a page of its own.

• Sep 5 · Four project rows said no document states their figure. Two of those documents were already in our own archive. On 18 August we logged that seven project rows cited a document that does not state their figure, and that four of the seven “could not be fixed, so they were re-graded instead”. All four are fixed today. The documents that state them existed the whole time. Capitol Complex Renovation, ≈ $216.7M. The Joint Budget Committee’s FY 2026-27 capital figure-setting document states it on page 15: “The total cost of the project is currently estimated at $216.7 million, with an unfunded $31.7 million General Fund cost.” CSU Clark Building, ≈ $136.6M. Page 8 of the same document states all three parts together — $55.8M of earlier Capital Construction Fund appropriations, $55.0M of the university’s own institutional funds, and the $25,798,175 final phase the Long Bill enacted. The row now prints that addition. MyUI+, $86.2M, and DRIVES, $93.3M. Both come from the Legislative Council Staff memorandum on major IT capital construction projects, written for the Joint Technology Committee in December 2022. It says on page 4 that the Department of Revenue “was appropriated a total of $93.3 million for the project”, and MyUI+’s $57.8M and $28.4M sit in two consecutive sentences on page 8. No figure on this site changes. All four amounts are what they were. What changes is that each one now names a document that says so, with the page, and the two we add up print the addition. The four rows move from confidence C back to B: B here means an official record that may lag, or that restates a figure it did not originate, which is what a 2022 memorandum and a staff estimate are. The part worth publishing is what “no source states it” really meant. One of the two documents was already in our own archive, cited by thirty other rows on the same page, and nobody had read past its tables. The other answered on the first request, at the address this site had recorded for it since July. A check now carries each of the four sentences with its page, and fails if the published amount, the citation or the quotation drifts off the other two.corrected
• Sep 5 · The Sep 3 entry said the page no longer states the road safety split in prose, and three other places still did. The Sep 3 correction two rows down was about one paragraph on What you pay to register a car and closed by saying “the page no longer states a split in prose at all: it derives the sentence from the statutory schedule.” That was true of that one paragraph. The fee table’s own destination cell, an earlier plain-English paragraph higher on the same page, the receipt’s client-side calculator, and the road safety surcharge’s own definition on Ask WB all still read “60% state, 22% counties, 18% towns” as a flat, present-tense fact — three days after the entry above said the sentence was fixed. No figure changed and no figure was wrong; this is the same shape as the Sep 4 entry above it, found the same way: a fix that reached one surface and stopped. The destination string is now built from the same statutory schedule the corrected paragraph already used — C.R.S. 43-4-205(6)(b) at 60/22/18 before 1 September 2025, C.R.S. 43-4-205(6.3)(b)(I) (Senate Bill 25-258) at 56/24/20 from that day — so all four surfaces read one derivation instead of four typed copies, and a selftest now asserts the three shares sum to 100 and match the schedule in force. Found by a page-by-page audit of the site’s own public copy.corrected
• Sep 4 · Three pages divided one budget by three different populations, and the entry below said we had already fixed it. On 5 August we logged the correction two rows down: the $100 receipt had been dividing by an unsourced “5.99M residents (est.)”, and we wrote that “every per-resident figure is now on that single Census estimate”. That was true of one page. The fix reached the dashboard and stopped there. Until today Follow Your Dollar published ≈ $8,275 per resident and the worked example on the methodology page published ≈ $8,280, both still on the withdrawn population, while the dashboard published ≈ $8,243. One quantity, three answers, on three pages a reader can open side by side. Follow Your Dollar also multiplies that figure by a county population to draw its population-share benchmark, so every one of the 64 county benchmarks was about 0.4 percent high. The figure is ≈ $8,243. That is $49,560,763,693 of FY 2026-27 appropriations over 6,012,561 Colorado residents — the U.S. Census Bureau’s Vintage 2025 estimate for 1 July 2025, and the same count the incarceration rate on this site divides by. Neither the budget nor the population moved. What changed is that all three pages now read them instead of remembering them. The part worth publishing is why nothing caught it. Our checks proved the dashboard’s figure against the pipeline on every run, and never asked whether any other page agreed with it — so a correction we had published, and believed, was false on two of the three pages it covered. Every surface that prints this figure or its denominator is now written from one derivation, and the check fails if any of those pages prints either withdrawn number anywhere: inside a figure, or in the sentence beside it.corrected

Read all 41 corrections, oldest to newest→