Property Taxes in the Denver Metro
1. How Colorado property tax actually works
Colorado doesn't tax a home's full market value the way some states do. Instead, the county assessor determines your property's actual value (roughly, market value), then multiplies it by a statewide assessment rate to get the much smaller assessed value that local mill levies are actually applied to. A $700,000 home isn't taxed as if it were worth $700,000 -- it's taxed on a fraction of that, set by the assessment rate described in Section 2.
Two structural features shape everything else about this system. First, TABOR (the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights, a 1992 constitutional amendment) requires voter approval before most Colorado tax rate increases can take effect, which pushes a lot of local tax questions onto the ballot rather than into a legislature or city council vote alone. Second, for nearly 40 years the residential assessment rate itself was set by a different constitutional provision, the Gallagher Amendment, which mechanically rebalanced the rate every two years to hold residential property to a fixed share of total statewide property tax collections. Voters repealed Gallagher in November 2020 (Amendment B), which froze the assessment-rate question and handed it to the state legislature -- which has since adjusted it session by session, most recently through bills including SB24-233 and a special-session bill, HB24B-1001. That's the genuinely unusual, still-evolving part of Colorado's system worth understanding before you compare a tax bill here to one from a state with a simpler flat-rate approach.
2. The 2026 residential assessment rate
For the 2026 tax year, Colorado's residential assessment rate is 7.05% for the portion of a property's value supporting school district levies, and 6.80% for the portion supporting other local government levies (county, city, special districts) -- a split-rate structure that is itself a product of the post-Gallagher legislative bills referenced above. On top of the rate itself, current law also exempts 10% of the first $700,000 of a primary residence's actual value from the assessed-value calculation, before the assessment rate is applied -- a meaningful reduction for a typical Denver-metro home. Confirm both the current-year rate and exemption threshold directly with the Colorado Division of Property Taxation or your county assessor before relying on either figure -- this is exactly the kind of number the state legislature has shown it's willing to adjust from one session to the next since Gallagher's repeal.
3. The Senior & Disabled Veteran Homestead Exemption
Colorado's constitution (Article X, Section 3.5, added by voters in 2000) separately authorizes a homestead exemption of 50% of the first $200,000 of actual value for two groups: seniors 65 and older who have owned and occupied the home as their primary residence for at least 10 consecutive years, and qualifying 100% disabled veterans (regardless of the 10-year requirement). This exemption is subject to annual state legislative funding and has been suspended in past budget years -- whether it's funded for a given tax year is a real, recurring question, not a settled guarantee, so confirm current-year funding status and the exact dollar threshold with the Colorado Department of the Treasury or your county assessor before counting on it. It's applied for through the county assessor's office, not automatically granted.
4. Representative figures by county
As with the assessment rate itself, we deliberately don't publish a single "the mill levy is X" figure per county here -- actual mill levies are set annually by dozens of overlapping taxing districts (county, city, school district, special districts for water, fire, RTD, and more) layered on top of the statewide assessment rate, so a single number would be stale within months and could vary block to block depending on which special districts cover a specific address.
| County | Covers (this site's guides) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Denver (city and county) | Downtown Denver, Highlands/LoHi, Cherry Creek, Capitol Hill, RiNo/Five Points, Washington Park | Combined city-and-county government -- one taxing jurisdiction rather than a separate city layered on a county |
| Arapahoe | Centennial, Littleton (county seat), part of Aurora | Mill levies vary significantly by city/special-district combination -- confirm for a specific address |
| Douglas | Highlands Ranch (unincorporated), Parker | Highlands Ranch's HOA-equivalent Metro District assessments (see our governance guide) are separate from, and in addition to, county property tax |
| Jefferson | Lakewood, Golden (county seat), Arvada | Confirm current mill levy directly with the Jefferson County Assessor |
| Adams | Part of Aurora, part of Westminster | Confirm current mill levy directly with the Adams County Assessor |
| Broomfield (city and county) | Broomfield | Like Denver, a combined city-and-county government |
| Boulder | Boulder (county seat) | A separate MSA from Denver-Aurora-Lakewood, included on this site for its commuting-corridor ties -- confirm mill levy directly with the Boulder County Assessor |
Sources: Colorado Constitution Article X (assessment-rate and TABOR framework); SB24-233 and HB24B-1001 (2026 rate figures) and Colorado Constitution Article X, Section 3.5 (senior/veteran exemption), as summarized in this research pass -- we did not independently re-verify current-year mill levies for any specific county or special district, and this page should not be read as confirming one. Aurora spans three counties (Arapahoe, Adams, and a small Douglas County portion); which county applies depends on the specific address.
5. Appealing your assessment
Colorado's appeal process generally runs: an informal or formal protest to the county assessor's office first (Colorado assessors mail Notices of Valuation in the spring of reappraisal years, with a filing deadline typically in June -- confirm the exact current-year date with your county), then, if unresolved, to the county's Board of Equalization. Beyond that, owners can generally choose between the Board of Assessment Appeals (a state-level administrative body), binding arbitration, or district court. We were not able to independently confirm exact current-year deadlines or procedural detail for this specific appeal chain in this research pass -- confirm the current process and dates directly with your county assessor's office before relying on this summary for an actual appeal.
6. How we keep this page current
The structural mechanics in Section 1 (TABOR, the Gallagher repeal) are settled history and don't change. The specific rate and exemption figures in Sections 2 and 3, and any county-specific mill levy, are exactly the kind of numbers the Colorado legislature and individual taxing districts revisit regularly -- we've deliberately flagged what we could and couldn't independently confirm in this pass (including every county's actual current mill levy, and the Senior Exemption's current-year funding status) rather than guess. This page was drafted without live web-search access and should be treated as a starting structural reference, not a final-checked figure sheet, until a future pass re-verifies it against primary sources. If you spot something on this page that's changed, or notice a broken link, we'd like to know -- see our contact information.