Where will $5.41 billion
of Denver’s money go?
Denver’s Final 2026 budget puts total net expenditures, all funds, at $5.41 billion. That is the book’s own “more accurate picture” of city spending, net of the money the city pays itself. The city publishes five true citywide totals for the same year, so every figure on this page is labeled with its quantity, every time it appears.
FACT Source: Final 2026 budget book (opens in a new tab) · City and County of Denver · carries the Annual Appropriation Ordinance, CB25-1813, as enactedWhere $100 goes, by fund group CALC
| Fund group | Per $100 |
|---|---|
| General Fund | $28.38 |
| Enterprise funds | $21.72 |
| Appropriated special revenue funds | $16.57 |
| Capital projects funds | $16.24 |
| Debt service funds | $14.75 |
| Internal service funds | $2.34 |
| Total | $100.00 |
Enterprise funds are the operations that pay their own way — the airport is most of it — so a large share here is not tax money. The General Fund slice is the estimated-expenditures quantity, because that is the figure the city’s fund breakout carries.
$60 million of the net total, 1.11%, is collected for another body. It is tax-increment money that belongs to the Denver Downtown Development Authority. The city budgets it, and the Authority owns it. CALC $60,000,000 ÷ $5,411,388,000 (total net expenditures, all funds, 2026) = 1.11%. Over the $5,858,807,000 gross, the same $60,000,000 is 1.02%. Source: the Final 2026 budget book, project 38383 in the Capital Projects Funds summary and its description (pp. 736–737).
What this total counts
Denver collects some money for other governments. Three choices decide what the total above includes. Each one is stated here so a reader can disagree with it.
- The Downtown Development Authority’s money is counted as passed through. The $60,000,000 is that Authority’s own tax-increment revenue, so it is its money and not the city’s. Source: the Final 2026 budget book, project 38383, Capital Projects Funds summary and project descriptions (pp. 736–737).
- The Denver Health fund is counted as Denver’s own money. The $67,659,469 Denver Health and Hospital Authority Tax Fund comes from a 0.34% sales and use tax that Denver voters approved in 2024 (Ballot Measure 2Q) and dedicated to Denver Health. It is Denver’s tax, set by a vote, so it stays in the total and is not called passed through. At most this amount reaches Denver Health, because the fund also pays 1.50 positions of administration. Source: the Final 2026 budget book, special revenue fund 11892 (p. 439) and ordinance item 11892-6520000 (p. 275).
- Denver Public Schools’ property tax is collected on the same bill, and it is not in this total. Denver’s property tax bill carries 79.602 mills, and 52.274 of them are the school district’s. A mill is $1 of tax for every $1,000 of assessed value. The district’s own budget holds that money, so no part of it is in any figure here. Source: the Final 2026 budget book, property tax levy table (p. 220).
What is deliberately not shown here
- The fifth total is named, not published. The book’s prose also states a $4.4 billion “total 2026 budget for all appropriated funds (less duplications)”. The arithmetic path from the printed fund totals to that figure is not printed in one place. So it is named here as the book’s own words, and not republished as a tile.
- Denver Public Schools is a separate government. The school district — formally School District No. 1 in the county of Denver — levies its own taxes and adopts its own budget. None of its money is in any city figure on this page, and no education figure here is ever derived from the city budget. The district’s own funding, enrollment and graduation rate are published further down, under What the money buys, labeled as the district’s and never added to anything above.
- The city’s checkbook is a different basis and is not divided into anything here. Denver’s open-data checkbook records payments — cash going out the door, by payee, one dataset per year through 2025. Payments are not appropriations: no figure on this page divides one by the other, and no 2026 checkbook exists yet.
- The state’s figures about Denver are named as the state’s. Colorado is a locale on this site in its own right, and its pages quote some Denver facts from the same publishers. The household section below, What a household pays, quotes the state’s property tax report and Denver’s own tax publications, as read for the Colorado page. Each line there names its publisher, and none is added to the city’s budget. Every other figure on this page comes from this locale’s own pipeline: Denver’s own records, and the state’s district-by-district school publications, which print Denver Public Schools as a row of their own.
Capital projects
Denver’s own capital money for 2026, from the Final 2026 budget book. The city lists part of it project by project. The Projects page shows each of those projects beside the capital budget it belongs to. Spending by project is not published, so none is shown.
The State of Colorado also spends capital money at sites in Denver. That is a different government’s money. The Projects page lists it below the city’s own, and it is never added to any figure here. State projects in Denver
Where the money comes from
PENDINGWhere Denver’s money comes from — taxes, charges, fees and grants, by source — is printed in the same Final 2026 budget book. It is not on this page yet. Until it is, this section stays blank on purpose rather than estimated. What a household pays in the two taxes it sees directly is in the next section.
What a household pays
Two city taxes reach a Denver household directly: the sales tax at the register and the property tax bill. Each line below names who levies it and where the figure is published. The school district’s share of the property tax bill is shown beside the city’s, and the two are never added together. Property tax figures are amounts levied, not amounts collected.
- FACT City sales and use tax rate: 5.15% of a taxable sale. Source: City and County of Denver, Department of Finance, Treasury Division, Denver Tax Guide Topic No. 70 — Sales Tax (revised 03/2026).
- FACT Combined rate a shopper pays in Denver: 9.15%. This is Denver’s own printed combined rate. It includes shares for the state and for regional districts, and those shares are not Denver’s money. Source: City and County of Denver, Department of Finance, Treasury Division, Denver Combined Tax Rates, effective 1-1-2025.
- FACT Denver’s own property tax levy: 26.328 mills. A mill is $1 of tax for every $1,000 of assessed value. Source: Colorado Governor's Office of Information Technology / Department of Local Affairs, PropTaxMap — Levies (taxing districts/authorities in Colorado).
- FACT Property tax levied for the City and County of Denver, 2025: $685,728,245. CALC That is 29.6% of everything levied on property in Denver, $2,314,333,258. Source: Colorado Department of Local Affairs, Division of Property Taxation, 2025 Fifty-Fifth Annual Report to the Governor and the General Assembly.
- FACT Levied for the school district on the same bill: $1,441,397,716. CALC That is 62.3% of the total. It is Denver Public Schools’ money, not the city’s, and it is never added to the city’s figure. Same source as the line above.
- CALC The remaining 8.1% of what is levied in Denver goes to other bodies on the same bill, such as special districts. It is not listed line by line here: $2,314,333,258 less the city’s and the school district’s amounts, over the total.
- CALC City property tax per resident: ≈ $926. $685,728,245 ÷ 740,613 residents (Census, 2025). It is levied, not collected, and residents are not the only payers: businesses pay property tax too.
What the money buys
The budget above shows what the city enacts. This section adds the city’s own record of what that money is for, beside outcome measures from federal publishers. No causal claim is made, here or anywhere on this site.A city is not a small state, and this section is shaped by what does not transfer. The vehicle theft rank is a one-of-51 comparison between states; a city is not a member of that set, so the rank is refused outright rather than left as work outstanding. Incarceration in a consolidated city-and-county is a jail measure, and no machine-readable custody count has been located yet — the tile says so rather than borrowing the state prison series. Education belongs to Denver Public Schools, a separate government, so none of its money is in any city figure on this page — and it is published here because that district’s boundary is the city’s, proved block by block rather than assumed.
Justice
The usual coverage test could not be used, so a different one is. State locales gate each crime year on the FBI’s percent-of-population coverage; the agency endpoint carries no per-agency coverage figure at all. The refusal here is a floor on the count itself — a year reporting fewer than 500 thefts would be published as a gap, not a rate. No Denver year comes near it: the lowest is 3,443 in 2014.
No U.S. line is drawn. The department has reported under NIBRS since 2005, by the FBI’s own roster, so its series does not cross the 2021 national reporting change — but a national comparison line would, and a line that crosses a counting change mid-chart misleads quietly. The chart shows Denver alone, and says so.
View the vehicle-theft series as a table
| Year | Offenses reported | Population served | Rate per 100,000 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 3,443 | 665,353 | 517.5 |
| 2015 | 4,374 | 682,418 | 641.0 |
| 2016 | 4,796 | 699,259 | 685.9 |
| 2017 | 5,572 | 706,616 | 788.5 |
| 2018 | 5,336 | 720,745 | 740.3 |
| 2019 | 5,300 | 728,941 | 727.1 |
| 2020 | 8,425 | 737,709 | 1,142.0 |
| 2021 | 12,727 | 740,209 | 1,719.4 |
| 2022 | 15,192 | 705,264 | 2,154.1 |
| 2023 | 12,410 | 712,222 | 1,742.4 |
| 2024 | 8,812 | 722,031 | 1,220.4 |
Offenses and population served are the Denver Police Department’s own figures from one FBI response; the rate divides one by the other, times 100,000. The population column is the agency’s figure. It differs from the Census resident population of Denver by about 2.5% — two denominators for two jobs, never interchanged. All eleven years reported all twelve months.
Education
Every other city on this site refuses education, and Denver is the exception because the boundary was proved rather than assumed. The Census Bureau assigns every one of Colorado’s census blocks to a school district, and a block’s identifier begins with its county. Read both ways, on the 2020 file: all 10,149 blocks in the City and County of Denver are served by Denver Public Schools, and all 10,149 blocks that district serves are in Denver. Not one block either way sits outside. The ingest stops on a single exception rather than rounding one off — if it ever finds one, these measures get renamed for what they actually cover.
The boundary is exact; the student body is not. Colorado has open enrollment, so a district’s count is of students attending it. 7,505 of the students counted above have parents living in another district — 8.4% of the total, the largest single origin being Adams-Arapahoe 28J at 2,224. The state’s workbook lists the reverse direction district by district and prints no total for it, so none is stated here.
One document on that page is a trap worth naming. A link labeled “Year Over Year Run” sits beside the current one and names no stage at all. It is an introduced bill’s comparison from two fiscal years earlier — a proposal, not an enactment, under a neutral label on a current page. It is not read here.
The enrollment chart starts at 2017-18 for a reason that belongs to the workbook, not to Denver. That sheet lists the school organizations that exist today, while each column is that year’s actual statewide count. Its district rows sum to its own printed state total exactly in the nine most recent years, and fall 160 and 163 students short in 2015-16 and 2016-17 — students enrolled in organizations that have since closed and have no row to sit on. Rather than publish two years the completeness check cannot cover, the chart starts where it can be measured.
View enrollment as a table
| School year | PK-12 pupil membership |
|---|---|
| 2017-18 | 91,794 |
| 2018-19 | 91,998 |
| 2019-20 | 92,112 |
| 2020-21 | 89,061 |
| 2021-22 | 88,889 |
| 2022-23 | 87,864 |
| 2023-24 | 88,235 |
| 2024-25 | 90,450 |
| 2025-26 | 89,210 |
The state education department’s October count for this district — the same collection and the same count date as the statewide figure, which is why this measure carries the same name here as it does on the state’s own page. Every year above is reconciled the same way: the workbook’s 186 district rows sum to its own printed state total for that year, to the student.
View graduation rates as a table
| Class of | Cohort size | 4-year graduation rate |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 6,177 | 70.9% |
| 2020 | 6,197 | 74.6% |
| 2021 | 6,493 | 74.0% |
| 2022 | 6,568 | 76.5% |
| 2023 | 6,624 | 79.0% |
| 2024 | 6,650 | 79.9% |
| 2025 | 6,943 | 81.9% |
One release per class, seven separate workbooks. Each release prints four rows for every district — the four-year rate for its newest class, then five-, six- and seven-year rates for the three classes before it — so reading a release’s latest class without checking which rate it is reads a seven-year rate as a four-year one. Only the four-year row is taken.
Four of the seven files sit under identical link text on the publisher’s archive page, so each one proves it is the release it claims to be: its own statewide four-year rate for that class must equal the figure the state published for it. Where a release prints the graduate count as well as the class size — four of the seven do — the printed rate is re-derived from those two figures.
View school funding as a table
| Fiscal year | Quantity | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| FY 2025-26 | Total Program funding | $1,028,928,091 |
| FY 2025-26 | State share | $249,399,960 |
| FY 2025-26 | Local share | $779,528,131 |
| FY 2025-26 | Funded pupil count | 84,754 |
| FY 2025-26 | Per funded pupil | $12,140 |
All five figures are one row of the state’s own district-by-district run, as appropriated in HB25-1320 and SB25-315. The 178 district rows in that run sum to its own printed statewide Total Program to the dollar, and Denver’s state share plus local share is its Total Program exactly.
Three of the run’s five columns are printed rounded, and that is stated rather than left implied. The funded pupil counts sum 19 pupils above the printed statewide count, the state shares $4 over and the local shares $1 under, and the run’s own statewide line is a dollar short of its own two shares added. Denver’s per-pupil figure divides out to $12,140.17, but the same test fails on 108 of the 178 rows for the same rounding reason — so it is checked here and not claimed of the run.
Total Program is not the district’s budget. It is the school finance formula amount. Denver Public Schools adopts its own budget, which also carries federal money, bond money and grants this figure does not count. And it is not the city’s money: the district is a separate government and no figure here is ever added to a figure above.
Government you can actually see.
Denver Works Better turns the city’s $5.41 billion of net citywide spending into plain-English answers. Denver publishes five true citywide totals for 2026, and the press usually headlines a fifth — so every figure here is labeled with which quantity it is, every time it appears. Denver is a consolidated city and county: one government on one boundary, which makes it the one place on this site where the city and the county are the same answer.
Facts, not spin
Every figure ties to an official record with its source and confidence grade. We keep appropriated, spent, and delivered clearly separate — and never estimate what we can’t verify.
Plain language
No jargon, no 400-page PDFs. If a resident can’t see where the money goes in under a minute, we haven’t done our job.
Accountability
We publish the open questions the city should answer, and the ones it has not answered yet. When a brief worth reading exists we will put it in your hands — and until it does, this site says so rather than announcing a schedule it has not kept.
Weekly reports
PENDINGThe first brief has not been written
Rather than show an example of what one might look like, this space stays empty until a real one exists. A sample brief on a page like this is indistinguishable from a real one at a glance, and the whole point of this site is that you never have to guess which you are reading.
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The fine print
PENDINGWhat this page does not cover yet
- The Denver City Council. This page does not cover council votes or ordinances yet. The budget figures above come from the city’s own published budget book.
The corrections log
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