What the money buys
The budget shows what the city enacts. This page 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 page 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.