Half of Colorado’s property tax goes to school districts
Every figure here is read from a published document, or worked out from figures that are. Each one is checked again from this page every time it is built.
Where a property tax dollar goes
Counties in Colorado levy property tax. The money does not all go to one government.
It is split among five kinds of taxing authority. The Division of Property Taxation publishes that split every year, and this site now carries it.
For tax year 2025 the total levied across the state was $16.63B.
School districts took 50.9% of that. Counties took 22.5%. Special districts took 21.1%. Cities and towns took 4.4%. Local college districts took 1.1%.
A special district is a single-purpose government. Fire protection, water, libraries and recreation are the usual ones.
They take far more of the money than cities and towns do. That is the least expected line in the table, and it is not close.
The five shares add to 100%, so nothing sits outside them. The same split is published for each of the 64 counties, and your own county need not look like the state.
A month of the prison record left its window
The Department of Corrections publishes its prison population every month. It publishes it on a dashboard that holds a rolling window.
A rolling window drops its oldest month as it adds a new one. Nothing is archived behind it.
Last week this site carried June 2024. This week it does not, because the publisher no longer serves that month.
Our own weekly capture of that dashboard began in August. It never held June 2024 either.
The series now begins in July 2024, at 17,521 people. It ends in July 2026, at 18,246 people.
Nothing was wrong with the month that went. It was published and it was correct, and it can no longer be looked up.
This is the ordinary way a public record disappears. Not a deletion, and nobody’s decision — a window moving on.
House prices were restated, and Colorado’s rise is the smaller one
The Federal Housing Finance Agency tracks house prices. This week it restated its whole index, back to 1975.
Most quarters moved, and none moved far. The largest change to a Colorado reading was under three points, on an index above 800.
The number most readers want is the change since 2019. Colorado is up 51%. The national figure is 66.8%.
That runs against what people expect here. Over this stretch Colorado house prices rose more slowly than the country’s.
Rents, wages, child care and tuition sit beside this on Cost of Living.
The legislature recorded no votes this week
This section carries every vote the General Assembly recorded in the week the brief covers, with the tally the legislature printed for each one.
The General Assembly recorded no votes between 28 August 2026 and 3 September 2026. Its most recent recorded vote was on 13 May 2026.
Every recorded vote since 2016 is at Before It's Law.
A note on the checking
Every figure above comes from a published document. Each one is read again from this page every time the page is built, and compared against the dataset it came from.
A publisher restating its own figures is not a mistake by us, and is not logged as a correction. Things we get wrong are, in the corrections log.
How each figure is produced, and what we refuse to produce, is on the methodology page.
Where these figures come from
Every figure above is one of two kinds, and this is which. FACT means a publisher printed the figure and we read it there. CALC means we worked it out from figures a publisher printed, and the arithmetic is on the methodology page. Nothing here is estimated. The vote counts are a third kind and are not listed below. Each one is the tally the legislature printed on its own vote page, which the table links.
- FACT Colorado — total property tax revenue levied · 2025 · Colorado Department of Local Affairs, Division of Property Taxation, Fifty-Fifth Annual Report to the Governor and the General Assembly (2025) Back to the sentence
- FACT DOC incarcerated population (end of month) · July 2024 and July 2026 · Colorado Department of Corrections, CDOC Dashboard Measures — Population (Tableau Public) Back to the sentence
- CALC House prices, Colorado — change since 2019 Q1 · 2019 Q1 – 2026 Q1 · Federal Housing Finance Agency, House Price Index, all-transactions, state, quarterly, not seasonally adjusted (hpi_at_state.csv) Back to the sentence
- CALC House prices, United States — change since 2019 Q1 · 2019 Q1 – 2026 Q1 · Federal Housing Finance Agency, House Price Index, all-transactions, U.S. and Census divisions, quarterly, not seasonally adjusted (hpi_at_us_and_census.csv) Back to the sentence