Before It's Law

Find a bill Watch how this works (1:27)

Type a bill number, or a word from the title. The boxes filter; they never answer — you pick the bill.

Press / from anywhere on this page to jump to the box. When your typing leaves exactly one bill, Enter opens it.

A fiscal note is a forecast at a version. It is not a cost. Every figure above carries the date it was written and the version it describes. What a bill actually cost is a different question, and Colorado does not publish the answer.

This is the one table on this site that needs JavaScript. Every other table here works without it. This one cannot: sending all 7,310 rows at once would make the page too large to load, so the search box, the filters, the sorting and all 16 sessions are put together in your browser.

The finding

Most price tags never move. The ones that do, mostly fall.

Comparing each bill's first estimate with its last needs both to carry a figure. 3,675 bills do. Here is what happened to them.

Of the 1,081 bills whose estimate moved at all, down beats up by about 2.1 to 1. The most common thing that happens to a Colorado bill's price tag is nothing. The second most common is that it is taken out of the bill.

The record

What is here

Every bill gets a fiscal note. There is no dollar threshold, so a bill the state expects to cost nothing gets a note that says so.

232 of the 7,310 bills have no note in this cache at all. They are listed with that reason rather than dropped. A bill missing from a list of every bill is the one thing a reader cannot see.

The Outcome column starts in 2025

This page reads what happened to a bill out of the fiscal note. Only a note written after the bill was disposed of prints it. So 1,206 of the 7,310 bills here carry an outcome. Every one of them sits in a 2025 or 2026 session. The other 6,104 are marked Not stated. That is this page not having read it, not the state not having published it. The legislature prints every bill's disposition on the bill's own page, and every bill here links to that page. So the outcome filter narrows you to 2025 and 2026 as well.

What this page will not tell you

Three questions, and one of them has no answer anywhere

There is no scorecard here and no party column. Adding up the estimated cost of the bills a member sponsored would invent a measure and dress it as a fact. A party column would make everything above it read as a partisan scorecard. This site is neutral infrastructure.

How this is read

Method

Which note comes first

Each bill's notes are put in order by the date each note prints about itself. Where two notes carry the same date, the FINAL banner an older note prints at the top of page one breaks the tie. Where neither settles it — 26 bills — both notes are shown and no direction is claimed. A direction there would be a coin toss wearing a percentage.

This matters more than it sounds. The cached file names do not run in date order: the two are the other way round for every session before 2026. Read them by file name rather than by printed date and "down beats up 2.1 to 1" becomes the opposite claim. Every other check on the page still passes.

Which figure is compared

The comparison is state expenditures in the budget year — the fiscal year the note itself labels as the budget year. Notes print two, three or four years. The column count also changes between versions of the same note. So the year is bound to the ruler the note prints, never to a column position.

What each note is checked against

Where a note prints a fund breakdown, the fund lines must add up to the total the note prints. That total must also equal the figure in the summary table. Both checks run on every read. A note that fails is reported, never quietly dropped.

What a bill is about is the legislature's own summary

Each bill record opens with the Bill Summary written by Colorado Legislative Council Staff, printed word for word from the bill's own page on leg.colorado.gov with the date it was read. This site does not write, shorten or rephrase it. The summary says which version of the bill it describes, and that note is printed beside it. Where the legislature publishes no summary, the record says NOT PUBLISHED and the space stays blank.

Sponsors are shown as the legislature's own identifier

The record gives each sponsor as a web address fragment, such as chris-degruy-kennedy. Turning that into a name means guessing where the capital letters go, and this site does not guess about a person's name. Each one links to the legislature's own page, which prints it properly.

Source

Fiscal notes and vote records are published by the Colorado General Assembly at leg.colorado.gov↗ (opens in a new tab). Notes are required by Joint Rule 22, with House Rule 32A and Senate Rule 25(e). The notes on this page were taken from each bill's own page on the legislature's site on 17 August 2026; the notes of the 139 bills that changed since then were taken again on 2026-09-23; the notes of 4 more bills were taken on 2026-09-24.