You pay in. Where does it go?
Start with your ZIP code. This page estimates what your household pays into Colorado’s $49.6 billion FY 2026-27 budget. Then it traces those dollars back out — statewide, to your county, and to your ZIP code. It keeps going: your county’s property tax, the income tax and its history, and the sales tax stack where you live. It ends with your minimum — the least your bills can add up to.
We disclose every mechanism. Where nobody publishes the answer, we say so instead of guessing.
The calculator runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter — ZIP, income, home value, spending — is ever sent, stored, or sold. No accounts, no cookies, no tracking of you — that’s our charter. We do count, in aggregate and without a cookie, that a page was read and that a control was used — never a word of what you type — and the page asks our own edge once for a coarse region. All of it is disclosed in full in the methodology.Your details
More detail (fuel, tobacco, marijuana)
Your household’s estimated payment
The estimate CALC
| Mechanism | Rate | Your est. / yr |
|---|
Two of those lines are fees, not taxes. The road usage fee and the FASTER surcharges are charges the legislature can set without a statewide vote. Under TABOR, a new tax needs voter approval and a fee does not. That is why road money has moved toward fees (SB 21-260), and this project tracks the pattern. Your car’s registration is its own stack of fees — road safety, bridge safety, the Keep Colorado Wild pass and more. Every line is itemized at what one car actually costs.
The round trip
Tracing the money back to you
If your dollars followed the FY27 budget…
Did your county pay in more than it got back? Nobody knows.
That answer needs three numbers, and only two exist. Your household’s payment is estimated in Part 1 — Deliberately understated. Where a rate or a base is uncertain we take the low end. The taxes we cannot tie to one household are left out.
What got built here is in the county card above — Located in, not spent for. A highway rebuilt in your county carries drivers from everywhere. The third number, what your county as a whole paid in, is the one that does not exist:
Not “we haven’t gotten to it” — the state publishes tax receipts by county in no system, for no year. We could multiply your household by a county population and print something confident. It would be our arithmetic wearing a citation. So we don’t. Instead we filed a public-records request for the record that would answer it — CORA request #1, seeking the transaction-level CORE extract. When the state answers, this section fills in.
Even the two numbers we do have must never be divided into a score of whether your county “gets its money’s worth.” They run on different clocks — Not annual: project values span many years; your payment is one year. Not spend-to-date: Colorado publishes no per-project spending, so nobody outside the state knows what has actually been paid out. And they cover different slices — all your state taxes against capital projects over $10M.
Where money is built is a decision about geography, need, and engineering — mountains, rivers, where the interstate already runs. A county with few large projects is not being cheated, and a county with many is not winning. We show you what the record says. You draw your own conclusions. The moment we score it, we are lobbying rather than reporting.
The income tax is flat.
It does not hold still.
Colorado charges one rate on every income. There are no brackets, and that is what “flat” means. It does not mean the rate stays the same. There have been four different rates in the last seven years.
The rate drops in a year after the state collects more than it is allowed to keep. That limit is TABOR — the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, added to the state constitution in 1992. Handing the money back through a lower rate is one of the ways the state returns a surplus.
You will meet that rule again on this page: the same surplus test puts a temporary credit on property tax bills, in Part 4. One mechanism, showing up twice on what a household pays.
| Tax year | Rate |
|---|---|
| 2025 | 4.40% |
| 2024 | 4.25% |
| 2023 | 4.40% |
| 2022 | 4.40% |
| 2021 | 4.50% |
| 2020 | 4.55% |
| 2019 | 4.50% |
Why we do not show this on your salary. Colorado does not tax your pay. It taxes your taxable income, which is a smaller number. That figure comes off your federal return, after the federal standard deduction, and is then adjusted by Colorado’s own additions and subtractions. The rate applied to a salary is always too high, so we do not print it.
Your column above uses income minus the standard deduction only. It skips Colorado’s own additions and subtractions — usually a small effect — because those need your federal return, and we do not ask for it.
Two things this leaves out. Colorado also has an alternative minimum tax. It is a second calculation some filers have to run, charged on top of the normal tax. Below $50,000 the state publishes a table rather than a sum. It charges everyone in a $100 band the same amount. The Department’s own word for that is “approximate”.
What your county takes,
and why nobody can tell you
your bill
A property tax bill is not one charge. It is the sum of every taxing authority whose district contains your home. That means the county and a school district. Often it also means a fire district, a water district, and a metropolitan district. Colorado has 5,053 of them.
We can show you the one line that is the same for everyone in your county. We cannot show you your total, and this section explains why rather than guessing.
Renting? This part is still yours. A landlord pays these same lines and prices them into the rent.
Computed on the home value and county in the bar above — tap it to change either. The value is your home’s actual value: what the assessor says it would sell for, not what you owe on it.
Why there is no total here. Your bill depends on which district lines your address sits inside. Those lines follow fire, water and school boundaries. They do not follow ZIP codes or county borders. Two homes a mile apart can pay very different amounts. We would have to know your address to add it up, and we do not ask for it.
Two rates, not one. Since 2025 Colorado assesses a home twice. 6.25% of its value counts for local government, and 7.05% counts for schools. Every authority except schools is added up against the first rate; the school district uses the second.
These are the rates for tax year 2025 — the year of the mill levies above, and the bill most households are paying now. The local rate changes to 6.8% for tax year 2026, once those levies are set in December.
The discount that can vanish without a vote
Why this section is here: a property tax bill can jump in a year when nobody voted to raise anything. This line is often the reason. It is called the temporary tax credit — money your county collected but is not allowed to keep, handed back as a discount on the bill.
The word that matters is temporary. A county can drop the discount, or add it, in any year. Nobody votes on it. When it goes, your bill rises by exactly that much. When it arrives, your bill drops.
Between the two years Colorado publishes, 12 of 60 counties moved it.
The evidence: all 12 counties where it moved, and the three we cannot compare
| County | Total levy 2024 | Total levy 2025 | What moved |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cheyenne | 13.336 | 15.160 | Credit of 1.824 mills ended — nothing else moved |
| Clear Creek | 35.156 | 33.265 | Credit of 1.891 mills arrived — nothing else moved |
| Conejos | 24.843 | 20.629 | Credit changed and the abatement levy moved too |
| Douglas | 18.726 | 19.774 | Credit of 1.048 mills ended — nothing else moved |
| Elbert | 26.827 | 28.310 | Credit of 1.483 mills ended — nothing else moved |
| Fremont | 12.325 | 11.443 | Credit changed and the abatement levy moved too |
| Grand | 16.905 | 16.876 | Credit of 0.029 mills arrived — nothing else moved |
| Jackson | 15.714 | 16.150 | Credit of 0.436 mills ended — nothing else moved |
| Jefferson | 26.978 | 26.978 | Credit ended, but the levy was rearranged so the bill did not move |
| Prowers | 27.170 | 26.773 | Credit of 0.397 mills arrived — nothing else moved |
| San Juan | 19.641 | 19.001 | Credit changed and the abatement levy moved too |
| San Miguel | 11.620 | 10.657 | Credit of 0.963 mills arrived — nothing else moved |
Scroll the table sideways to see what moved in each county.
Four bills up, four down. In 4 counties the credit ended and nothing else on the levy moved, so the total rose by exactly the credit. In 4 others a credit arrived and the total fell by exactly as much. This is not a story about taxes only going one way. It is a story about a line that moves both ways, on its own.
Where we will not blame the credit. Three counties changed their credit and something else moved too, so the change in the bill is not the credit’s alone. We show what they did and say so, rather than rounding them into the four above.
Jefferson County is its own case. Its credit ended and the bill did not move at all. The general levy fell by exactly the amount of the credit, and separately a special levy became a bond levy. Nothing a household pays changed.
Two years is a change, not a trend. Colorado publishes this register for tax year 2024 and tax year 2025, and nothing earlier. So we can show you what moved between those two years. We cannot tell you whether it usually moves.
Three counties are missing from the comparison: Lake, Logan and Summit. Their 2024 figures do not add up to the totals the state printed beside them. So we leave them out. We would rather show nothing than a number we cannot check.
Your sales tax depends on where you buy
Every taxable thing you buy in Colorado carries the state’s 2.9%. The rest of the rate belongs to the address of the store — its county, its city, and any special district drawn around it. The Department of Revenue’s own rule: the total “must be computed by adding all taxes applicable to that jurisdiction”.
Enter a Colorado ZIP above and this fills in.
The whole stack, statewide: 51 of Colorado’s 64 counties add a county rate and 11 add none. 222 cities add their own. 70 special districts add more where their lines happen to fall. Denver and Broomfield are a city and a county on the same ground, so they levy as cities: 5.15% and 4.15%.
The full picture — home-rule cities, exemptions, and all 11 kinds of district
For 70 cities, the state can only give you a phone number. Colorado has home rule. 70 cities set and collect their own sales tax, and the Department of Revenue does not administer it. Its own guide says so: the publication “pertains only to state and local sales taxes administered by the Colorado Department of Revenue”.
So the state’s rate table lists those cities separately, with a street address and a telephone number for each. That is the state answering “what is the rate here?” with ask them yourself.
Two of those cities are also counties, so we can name their rate. Denver and Broomfield are one city and one county on the same ground. A ZIP that lands in Denver County lands in the City of Denver. They are the only two city rates this page can attach to a ZIP. Anywhere else, a ZIP does not tell you the city.
Both rates come from the city’s own publication, not the state’s. That is not a formality. The state’s table is out of date on Denver. It lists 4.31%, which is 0.84 points below what Denver itself charges. On Broomfield the same table is exact. One table, one publisher, one day — right about one city and wrong about the other.
The state says why itself. It does not collect these taxes, and its guide covers only the taxes it collects. Its list of home-rule rates is a courtesy, not a statement of the rate in force.
And the rate is not the whole question anyway. Counties do not all tax the same things. Their published rates carry codes for what is exempt, and there are 17 different combinations of them. Two counties charging exactly the same rate can be taxing a different basket, so knowing a rate still does not give you a bill.
The county rate is not even the same everywhere in a county. Pitkin County charges 3.6%, except inside the town of Basalt, where it charges 2.6%.
| Kind of district | How many |
|---|---|
| County Lodging District | 29 |
| Metropolitan District Tax | 9 |
| Regional Transportation Authority | 8 |
| Local Improvement District | 6 |
| Local Marketing District | 6 |
| Health Services District | 4 |
| Mass Transportation System | 3 |
| Public Safety Improvements | 2 |
| Multi-Jurisdictional Housing Authority | 1 |
| Regional Transportation District | 1 |
| Scientific and Cultural Facilities District | 1 |
Why we do not add these up. No address is inside all of them. A district applies only within its own boundary, so a column of rates has no meaningful total. The state points shops at a mapping database instead. It works out the rate for one address at a time. That is the honest shape of the answer.
The minimum
you are paying CALC
This last part adds up what the page can compute: income tax (Part 3), county property line (Part 4), and citable sales taxes (Part 5). The sum is a minimum, and the list of what is missing sits right under the table.
The income line uses your taxable income: household income minus the standard deduction, the same figure Part 1 taxes — not your salary. All inputs come from the bar above.
Why this is a floor and not a bill. Every line above is a rate that applies to everyone in Colorado, or to everyone in your county. Everything that depends on your exact address is missing — and that missing part is usually bigger than what is here.
Not included:
- Your school district. On a property tax bill it is often larger than the county itself.
- Any fire, water, sanitation or metropolitan district containing your home.
- Your city sales tax — unless you are in Denver or Broomfield, where the city is also the county, so Part 5 can name it. Any special district sales tax is missing everywhere.
- Vehicle registration. It is its own receipt, at what one car costs.
- Colorado’s alternative minimum tax.
We add these four and not the others on purpose. These are the only ones where every input is either published by the state or typed in by you. Add a school district and we have to guess which one. Add a city sales tax anywhere else and we have to guess where you shop. A floor that says it is a floor cannot mislead you upward.
The fine print — every mechanism, disclosed
This calculator lives under the Honesty Framework. Every number is a FACT from an official record, or a CALC with its formula shown. If it is neither, it is not here. Our estimates are conservative: when we must choose, we understate.
What we count — rates & sources
- State income tax — 4.40% of federal taxable income (TY2025 FACT; TY2026 projected — no TABOR rate cut triggered per the June 2026 LCS forecast). Baseline set by Prop 121 (2022); temporary cuts governed by SB24-228 (TY2024 was 4.25%; next projected cut: 4.36% in TY2028).
- Standard deduction — TY2025 federal: $15,750 single / $31,500 joint (IRS Publication 17 for 2025, “Standard deduction amount increased”). The IRS announced $15,000 and $30,000 for this tax year in October 2024 and raised them afterwards; this page printed the earlier pair until 7 September 2026, which made every income-tax line here slightly high. TY2026 figures are left blank until the IRS publishes them PENDING. Colorado additions/subtractions ignored — usually a small effect.
- State sales tax — 2.9% FACT. Groceries, prescriptions, gasoline and home energy are exempt. City & county sales taxes are not counted — they fund local governments, not this budget.
- Gasoline — 22.0¢/gal excise + 6.0¢/gal road usage fee (FY27 step of the SB21-260 schedule) = 28¢/gal FACT. Goes to the highway fund, not the General Fund.
- Vehicle FASTER surcharges — $37.30/yr per vehicle (typical 2,001–5,000 lb passenger vehicle: $19.30 road-safety + $18.00 bridge-safety) FACT. Base registration varies by vehicle and is not estimated.
- Cigarettes — $2.24/pack (through Jun 2027; steps to $2.64 Jul 2027 per Prop EE) FACT. Off unless you turn it on.
- Marijuana — 15% special sales tax on retail price FACT. The 15% wholesale excise sits inside the price and is not counted, so this line understates. Off unless you turn it on.
How the estimate works — and where it bends
- Sales-tax base is a floor. We count only three spending categories that we can verify as mostly state-taxable, then scale them to your income. They are dining out $3,945 + apparel $2,001 + entertainment $3,609 = $9,555/yr for the average household (BLS CE 2024). Furnishings, electronics and much else are taxable too, so the real figure is higher than shown.
- Spending scales linearly with income in our model (average household: $78,535 spent on $104,207 income). Real households don’t behave this cleanly — at low incomes this understates, at high incomes it may overstate.
- Driving doesn’t scale with income — gallons stay at your entered value regardless of income.
- TABOR: FY2025-26 revenue came in below the Referendum C cap — no refunds offset this year’s payments FACT. FY26-27’s projected $483M surplus routes to property-tax reimbursements first.
- The allocation view uses all-funds proportions. Your state taxes actually flow through the General Fund, whose department mix differs (CDOT gets ~0% GF; Medicaid is ~federal-matched). A GF-specific allocation is a planned upgrade, not a silent assumption.
What we don’t count — on purpose
- Property tax — $0 to the state. In Colorado it funds local governments and school districts’ local share, never the state budget.
- Local sales taxes — city, county, RTD and special-district taxes stay local.
- Federal taxes — they do return here, and 31% of this budget is federal funds. Tracing your federal dollars is a different calculator.
- Business taxes you may bear indirectly — corporate income tax ($1.6B), insurer premium taxes, severance. These are real. We cannot honestly assign them to one household.
- Small excises — liquor (8¢/gal beer, 60.26¢/L spirits), gaming, lottery. These come to a few dollars a year per household. We leave them out rather than pad the total.
- Specific ownership tax on vehicles — collected with your registration but distributed to local governments.
Your privacy — the mechanism, not a promise
- Nothing you enter leaves this page. The ZIP lookup, the math, the map — all run in your browser from data already inside this file. No cookies, no storage of any kind. Your ZIP, your income, your home value and your spending are read by this page and by nothing else, and a reload forgets them.
- What we do count, and it is not nothing. Aggregate, cookieless counts, with no identifier and no way back to a person: that a page was read, and that one of a fixed list of controls was used. Where a control involves something you typed, we record only that it happened and what kind of answer came back — entering a ZIP records “one county”, “a split”, “not listed” or “not a Colorado ZIP”, and never the ZIP. The page also asks our own edge once for a coarse region — a county only where your postal code sits wholly inside one, otherwise a group of counties or a whole state. That is the one request this site makes that you did not ask for, and the finer location it is worked out from is thrown away where it is read. Every word of this is in the methodology; the charter changes are logged in the corrections log, Aug 1 and Aug 24, 2026.
- Verify it yourself: open your browser’s developer tools → Network tab. You will see the counting described above and nothing else — no third-party host, and no request carrying anything you typed. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track signal, the region request and every one of those counts is switched off.
- Charter rule: we make money from neither the jurisdictions nor the public, and we never collect or sell user data. A transparency site that surveilled its readers would be a contradiction.
Known limits & open items (we show our homework)
- ZIP→county now comes from the Census ZCTA↔county crosswalk FACT — the Bureau’s own 2020 relationship file, covering all 530 Colorado ZCTAs. It replaces a hand-built draft table that covered the population centers and mapped every ZIP to exactly one county. That assumption was wrong for 155 of them (29%). Some split almost evenly: ZIP 80010 in Aurora is 51% Arapahoe and 49% Adams. Where a ZIP is split we show the parts and ask you to confirm, rather than picking for you. One limit, stated plainly: the Census file publishes each part’s land area and no population. Those percentages describe ground, not people. A large rural part can outrank the part where everyone lives. We use them only to order the choices and to show how close the split is. They never divide any money, and your county selection always overrides them.
- The home-value box now defaults to the Census median for your ZIP area FACT — table B25077, Census ACS 2020-2024, 5-year. It is the median value of owner-occupied homes in the ZIP’s Census area. Statewide: $539,400. It replaces a $600,000 example. For 57 of the 530 Colorado ZIPs, the Census publishes no median — too few owner-occupied homes. There the box shows the statewide median and says so, rather than guessing. One ZIP is published only as a cap (81655: $2,000,001 or more). The box seeds at the cap and labels it as such. A 5-year estimate describes the whole 2020–2024 window, not this year’s market. Per-ZIP medians exist on no other basis, so the vintage is named wherever the figure appears. Your own figure always wins.
- County population benchmarks cover all 64 counties FACT — Census Bureau Vintage 2024 population estimates. One product covers every county, so no county sits on a different vintage. This replaced an early hand-built table that covered only the 10 counties we had verified. Until the full file was in, we suppressed the other 54 rather than guess.
- County spending totals are NOT published by the state. The “projects in your county” list is real. It comes from our 50-project, $10M+ registry, with locations from official project records CALC. The population-share benchmark is arithmetic, not a measurement. The gap between them is the story.
- Hero-figure reconciliation — settled. This entry used to call the figure an open verification item, on the grounds that the portal showed $49.6B while a Long Bill total of $49,513,178,361 was in front of us. Both figures are real and neither is wrong: the General Assembly serves six versions of the same bill from one page, and their statewide totals run from $49,513,178,361 to $49,560,763,693, every one of which rounds to the same headline. We read the Final Act and no other version, identified by its session-law chapter rather than by its title or its total. The enacted figure is $49,560,763,693, reconciled twice against totals the act prints itself. Nothing is outstanding here.
- Average tax per return: the CO DOR publishes county-level income-tax statistics for the 2023 tax year, released Aug 2025. They will let this tool show “how your county compares”. Ingestion is pending.