Follow the money

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.

This is the City and County of Denver’s own budget, adopted by the Denver City Council. It is not part of the State of Colorado’s budget. The two are never added together: some state money reaches the city, so a sum would count it twice.

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FACT Source: Final 2026 budget book · City and County of Denver · carries the Annual Appropriation Ordinance, CB25-1813, as enacted

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Budget headline FACT

$5.41B

Total Net Expenditures, all funds, 2026 — the book’s own “more accurate picture” of city spending. It excludes $447.4M of internal service charges and transfers: money the city pays itself.

All funds, gross FACT

$5.86B

Total Expenditures, all funds, 2026, gross — the same budget counted before removing what the city pays itself. Shown beside the net figure, never instead of it.

General Fund appropriations FACT

$1.68B

Exactly $1,676,329,510. An appropriation is the amount the law allows an agency to spend. This is the enacted ordinance, to the dollar: all 64 General Fund items of CB25-1813 summed, including a $1 placeholder appropriation, equal the printed total exactly.

Per Denver resident CALC

≈ $7,307

$5,411,388,000 ÷ 740,613 residents (Census, 2025)

The $100 receipt See where $100 of city spending goes, by fund group Six fund groups, from the city’s own breakout of its gross budget. Capital projects See every capital project the city publishes for 2026 The city’s own capital money, project by project, as the budget book lists it, on a page of its own. The Budget See where the money comes from and where it goes Sources and uses in dollars and per $100, per resident, the largest line on each side, and what a household pays. Follow Your Dollar Estimate what your own household paid the state Colorado’s tool, by ZIP code. The arithmetic runs in your browser, and nothing you type leaves the page.

Where $100 goes, by fund group CALC

The city’s own fund breakout of the gross total, restated per $100. The six groups sum to the printed gross exactly, at the precision the city prints. The cents below are allocated so the column sums to exactly $100.00. This is drawn over the gross, because that is the total the city prints its fund breakout against. It means $7.64 of every $100 here is internal duplication, which the net figure removes.

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.

General Fund estimated expenditures FACT

$1.66B

The appropriation less $13.25M the city expects to go unspent — the “$1.66 billion budget” most news coverage cites. A different quantity from the appropriation, and the book prints both.

$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. Denver voters approved that tax in 2024 (Ballot Measure 2Q) and dedicated it 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. They are 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. An appropriation is money authorized to be spent.
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. Those print Denver Public Schools as a row of their own.

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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.

Capital improvement funds, all seven FACT

$659.9M

Total CIP Expenditures by Fund, 2026 — the city’s own printed capital total, all seven fund groups. Stated in whole thousands.

Published project by project CALC

$269.3M

40.8% of the seven funds’ total: $269,316,418 ÷ $659,901,000. Five funds list their projects. The bond funds and the grant funds print a fund total only.

The project ledger Open every capital project Each with its city agency, its capital fund and its 2026 appropriation, and an honest blank where the city publishes no spending.

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

State highway money paid to the city

CALC

The state’s Highway Users Tax Fund (HUTF) holds its fuel taxes and vehicle fees. Every month the State Treasurer pays each city and county a share of it for its roads. This is what the state paid the City and County of Denver. It is the state’s money paid to the city, and it is not added to the state’s figures, to a county’s, or to any other figure on this page.

Paid to the City and County of Denver, the state’s fiscal year 2025-26 CALC

$36,277,271.20

Year = the twelve monthly payments added up. Each month’s share is paid the month after, so FY 2025-26 is the payments made from August 2025 to July 2026.

FY 2024-25 $35,889,893.22
FY 2025-26 $36,277,271.20

Denver is one government, a city and county. The state pays it once, so this is the whole payment. It is not split into a city share and a county share, and it is shown only once.

Source: the state’s payment ledger, TOPS Expenses (opens in a new tab), from the Office of the State Controller. The figures are its Department of Treasury payments from the HUTF to the City and County of Denver. The State Treasurer publishes the same monthly payments in its HUTF payment tables (opens in a new tab). Read on 25 October 2026.

Where the money comes from

FACT

Denver’s appropriated governmental funds are the General Fund, the special revenue funds, the debt service funds and the capital funds. By the book’s own table, they expect to take in $3.14 billion in 2026. Sales and use taxes are the largest source, $42.26 of every $100, and property tax brings $20.90. Per resident, that total is ≈ $4,245.

The airport and the city’s other enterprise funds pay their own way and are outside this total. So it is not set against the spending total above. What a household pays in the two taxes it sees directly is in the next section.

Where the money comes from See every source in dollars and per $100 The city’s own table of what its governmental funds take in, beside where the money goes.

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 See the schools that serve the city, its jails and its police record Denver Public Schools, then the Sheriff’s budget and three crime rates, each beside Colorado and the nation. No causal claim is made, here or anywhere on this site.

Why this exists

Denver WorksBetter exists so any resident can see where public money goes, in plain English. Every figure names its official source, and a figure we cannot source stays blank.

The headline total is $5.41 billion of net citywide spending. 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. That makes it the one place on this site where the city and the county are the same answer.

Weekly reports

PENDING

No brief has been published for this locale yet. This section is empty because there is nothing to put in it, not because the format is still being designed. There is no publication schedule to announce, and none is claimed below.

Nothing published yet

The 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.

The fine print Read what the Denver pages do not cover yet Said plainly, so that a topic the site has not reached is never read as a topic with nothing in it.

The corrections log

Oct 16 · The crime-rate notes said the Colorado and U.S. lines divide by a “matched population.” They divide by the FBI’s population for the whole state or nation. The notes behind the Denver crime charts, on Ask, said the Colorado and U.S. rates divide reported offenses by the FBI’s “matched population,” and that the city’s own rate does not. The city’s rate divides by the population the police department serves, and that part was right. The population the FBI returns with those counts is every resident, not only those whose police agencies reported, and that is the one we used. No rate changed. Colorado’s own pages carried the same wording and were corrected on 15 October.corrected

The log begins on 16 October 2026. The most recent was 16 October 2026. Last checked 16 October 2026. The full log, on a page of its own