Where will $49.6 billion
of your money go?
Colorado's FY 2026–27 budget appropriates $49.6 billion — about $136 million every day. This portal turns the official record into plain English. It shows what was approved, what's actually being spent, and which major projects deserve your attention.
Your post
Where will $49.6 billion of your money go? Colorado's state budget, read from the official record, in plain English. #ColoradoWorksBetter #TaxpayerShareholder #ShowYourWork
https://colorado.worksbetter.org/
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Where $100 goes
| Department | Per $100 | FY27 budget |
|---|---|---|
| Health care · Medicaid & CHP+ (HCPF) | $41.45 | $20.54B |
| K-12 education | $15.87 | $7.86B |
| Higher education | $13.23 | $6.56B |
| Human services | $5.47 | $2.71B |
| Transportation | $4.64 | $2.30B |
| Corrections | $2.57 | $1.27B |
| Courts (Judicial) | $2.44 | $1.21B |
| All other departments · 16 agencies | $14.33 | $7.10B |
| Total | $100.00 | $49.56B |
What shaped these numbers — the pressures behind them, and how the mix compares to every other state — is on the budget in detail.
Your post
Where $100 goes. What Colorado's state budget pays for, from the enacted budget. #ColoradoWorksBetter #TaxpayerShareholder #ShowYourWork
https://colorado.worksbetter.org/#receipt
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This is the state’s receipt. Want yours? Follow your dollar — estimate what your household pays in, and where it lands →
Where these projects are
Capital & transportation projects over $10M · click a pin for its record · the whole ledgerYour post
Where these projects are. Colorado's largest building and road projects, on one map. #ColoradoWorksBetter #TaxpayerShareholder #ShowYourWork
https://colorado.worksbetter.org/#map
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What shaped this budget
Colorado’s mix differs from the 50-state average most on higher education — 15.9% of its spending against 8.8% across all states, a gap of +7.1 points. FACT Basis: self-reported expenditures, fiscal 2025 NASBO estimate — not this year’s enacted appropriation. Neither a rank nor a per-resident figure is derived on this basis: NASBO publishes shares only.
Your post
What shaped this budget. The pressures behind Colorado's budget, and how its spending compares with other states. #ColoradoWorksBetter #TaxpayerShareholder #ShowYourWork
https://colorado.worksbetter.org/#budget-detail
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Who pays for it
The dollars are the act’s. The shares are ours: each fund’s appropriation ÷ the act’s $49.6B all-funds total. They sum to 100%. CALC
"Reappropriated" is money counted twice as it moves between agencies. Net of double-counting, the budget is ≈ $46.7B. CALC
Your post
Who pays for it. Where the money in Colorado's state budget comes from. #ColoradoWorksBetter #TaxpayerShareholder #ShowYourWork
https://colorado.worksbetter.org/#funding
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Government you can actually see.
Colorado Works Better turns the state’s $49.6 billion of operating appropriations into plain-English answers. It shows what was approved, what’s being spent, and what taxpayers get for it. We don’t ask you to take our word for it. We show you the official record and the receipt behind every number.
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 state should answer. And we put a weekly, county-level report in residents’ hands, turning transparency into participation.
What changed this week
Published weekly, on Thursdays. Every figure in a brief is read back off the published page against the record it came from. A week with little in it is reported as a week with little in it — a quiet week is a finding about the record, not a gap in the brief.You can now follow a bill or a project
- Follow any bill on Before It's Law, or any project, and read each bill's own plain-language summary
- Type your ZIP code and this brief narrows to your county and its legislative districts
- Bill pages can be printed or shared as a QR code, and the project map now zooms
Before It's Law is live, and 122 bills have changed since August
- Before It's Law opened to readers on 16 September: every bill and every recorded vote, per bill
- Of the 656 bills read again this week, 122 changed. The other 6,654 were not re-read
The country's jobs figure reached August
- The national unemployment rate now runs to August
- The legislature recorded no votes in the week to 10 September
- Three corrections in two days, and all three were fixes that had stopped at one page
Watch your money where you live.
Pick your county and we will send one report a week built around it. It carries the statewide budget and project changes too, with a source behind every figure.
County figures come from the Division of Property Taxation, the state's property tax levy map, the State Treasurer and the Department of Revenue. Projects come from the enacted state budget and the capital requests published before it.
The corrections log
64 corrections since 11 July. The most recent was 25 September 2026. The three newest are below; the full log is a page of its own.
- Sep 25 · Entering a ZIP now also counts which state it belongs to — Until today, entering a ZIP on Follow Your Dollar counted one of four answers: one county, a split, not listed, or not a Colorado ZIP. Every ZIP box on the site now gives a full answer, and the count follows it. It records which kind of answer came back, which state or territory a U.S. ZIP belongs to, whether a foreign code looks Canadian or British, the shape of the entry (five digits, ZIP+4, letters) and which page it was on. When you open the link that asks us to come to your state, we count that too, with the state. The ZIP itself is never recorded. Every one of these is a fixed list of values, so there is no place a ZIP could go. The methodology page carries the full wording.disclosed
- Sep 25 · Colorado’s unemployment rate now comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics directly, and its newest month moves from May to August 2026. The answer to “Is anyone out of work right now?” on Questions said Colorado’s rate was 3.9% in May 2026, and the U.S. rate that month was 4.3%. It now says 4.0% in August 2026, and 4.1% for the U.S. that month. The Bureau of Labor Statistics marks August preliminary and may revise it when it publishes September, so the answer says so. The May figure was right for May. It came from the state labor department’s copy of the federal series on the state’s open-data portal. That copy stopped at May, and its last update was August 18. By then the department and the Bureau had both published June, July and August. We now read the series from the Bureau (LASST080000000000003), and Ask WB shows every month from January 2019. The Bureau’s figure for May is also 3.9%, so no month we published changed. We found it on September 24, 2026.revised
- Sep 25 · The Floyd Hill project page listed the project’s $905M total as a contract with its construction contractor, above that contractor’s four real contracts. The table of who is being paid had a row for the construction manager and general contractor with the value “$905M program.” $905 million is CDOT’s estimate of what the whole project will cost. It is not a contract. On September 25 we added the contractor’s four contracts from CDOT’s monthly dashboards, with what CDOT has paid on each. The older row stayed above them, so the table showed the same contractor twice, once at the cost of the whole project. The four contracts add to $678.15M. We removed the older row. The $905M estimate still shows as the project’s total cost, and no other figure changes. We found it on September 25.corrected