Denver County, Colorado property tax

ACS 5-year median real estate taxes paid (table B25103) divided by ACS 5-year median value of owner-occupied housing units (table B25077), county-wide. This is a ratio of two independently estimated medians — not the median of the ratio, and not a rate any parcel is billed. It reflects the actual mix of overlapping districts, exemptions and assessment caps as experienced by owner-occupants, and it lags: a 5-year sample centres about two and a half years before its end date.

Layer 1 of the county property-tax corpus: a MEASURED baseline from ACS 2020-2024 5-year, not a published rate. No statutory rate, assessment ratio or exemption has been collected for these counties yet, so nothing here should be read as what a particular property would be billed.

THE SCHEMA QUESTION, ANSWERED DELIBERATELY. Colorado gives one residential parcel two assessment ratios at once, selected by which levy is being computed, and `ClassRule.assessmentRatio` holds one number. `tieredRatio` does not help — it steps by value, not by levy. This record puts the SCHOOL rate, 7.05%, in `assessmentRatio`, for three reasons stated so nobody has to reconstruct them: it is the rate applied to a clean, unreduced actual value, so it is the one figure that is a true ratio of market value; school districts are the largest single levy class in the state at 50.00% of 2024 property tax revenue; and the local side's departure is then expressible in TWO pieces the type does hold — the base reduction as the `co-residential-local-levy-reduction` exemption with `appliesToLevies: non-school`, and this note. WHAT IS STILL LOST is the 6.8% itself: no field carries it. A consumer computing a county or municipal bill with 7.05% overstates the rate by 3.7% relative. That is the gap, it is filed, and it is the reason this state was expected to be the hardest of its batch. THE VALUES ARE UP TO THREE AND A HALF YEARS OLD, BY STATUTE. §39-1-104(10.2)(d) defines the level of value as actual value for the 18-month period ending the 30 June before the assessment date the administrator must use, and (10.2)(a) freezes it for the whole two-year cycle. For 2025 and 2026 the window is 1 January 2023 to 30 June 2024. So `valuation: { kind: market }` is true about the STANDARD and misleading about the CURRENCY, and there is no field for a level-of-value date. Real property is revalued in odd-numbered years only; personal property every year. WHO IS ACTUALLY INSIDE THE 5.5% LIMIT — THE HOME-RULE ANSWER IS NOT SYMMETRIC. §29-1-301(1)(a) reaches "counties, cities, and towns NOT CHARTERED AS HOME RULE", which reads as though home rule exempts both. It does not. §29-1-301(3): "The limitations of this part 3 shall apply to home rule counties unless provisions are included in the county home rule charter which are, as determined by the division of local government, equal to or more restrictive than the provisions of this part 3." So a home rule MUNICIPALITY is outside by its own charter, while a home rule COUNTY is INSIDE by default and escapes only on a Division of Local Government finding. Getting this wrong propagates: §29-1-1701(1)(c) excludes from the SB24-233 part 17 limit any entity "subject to and has not received voter approval to exceed the revenue limit set forth in section 29-1-301", so a mis-scoped part 3 mis-scopes part 17 too. §29-1-301 was last amended in 1996, not the 1980s. THE PART 17 LIMIT BINDS FAR FEWER ENTITIES THAN ITS TEXT SUGGESTS. Two exclusions narrow it sharply and neither is visible in the `Cap` record. §29-1-1701(1.5)(b) excludes any "city and county, city, or town that has adopted a home rule charter". More consequentially, §29-1-1701(1)(d) excludes any local government "that does not have voter approval to collect, retain, and spend, without regard to any spending, revenue, or other limitation contained within section 20 of article X of the state constitution, the majority of the ... revenue from the imposition of ad valorem property taxes" — that is, the limit binds only DE-BRUCED entities. An entity still inside its TABOR §20(7) revenue cap is outside part 17 entirely. Colorado has 5,310 active local governments, 3,438 of them title 32 special districts, so this exclusion is doing a great deal of work. THE PART 17 GROWTH RATE IS NOT AN ANNUAL RATE OVER A PRIOR-YEAR BASE, AND THE FIELD SAYS IT IS. §29-1-1703(1) sets the growth rate percentage at 5.25% MULTIPLIED BY THE NUMBER OF YEARS IN THE CURRENT REASSESSMENT CYCLE — 10.5% per two-year cycle — and applies it not to last year's revenue but to the highest qualified revenue of any year in a PREVIOUS reassessment cycle, then adds a carryover amount. `maxAnnualLevyGrowth: 0.0525` records the annualised rate and silently drops the base rule and the carryover. Read this note before using that number. THE SCHOOL DISTRICT LIMIT IS NOT A LEVY LIMIT AND IS NOT RECORDED AS A CAP AT ALL. §29-1-1702.5(2) caps the qualified local share property tax revenue of ALL Colorado school districts TOGETHER. When it binds, §29-1-1702.5(3)(a) does not cap a levy — it temporarily reduces the STATEWIDE RESIDENTIAL ASSESSMENT RATE for school mills to a "balancing percentage" the State Board of Equalization computes. No `Cap` member describes a revenue cap enforced by moving an assessment ratio, so none is used. On the figures: the limit is $4,417,419,719 for both PTY2025 and PTY2026, and the QUALIFIED local share revenue it is measured against is $4,111,729,624 (2025) and $4,109,803,422 (2026), leaving shortfalls of $305,690,095 and $307,616,297. Do not use the $4,360,696,367 and $4,330,586,548 figures that appear in the same memorandum's prose — those are Table 3 Row 1, GROSS local share revenue before exclusions, and pairing them with the shortfalls produces arithmetic that fails by a factor of three and a half. The memorandum's own prose makes this slip; its tables settle it. TABOR IS NOT ENCODED AS A CAP, ON PURPOSE. Colo. Const. art. X §20(4)(a) requires advance voter approval for a "mill levy above that for the prior year" or a "valuation for assessment ratio increase for a property class", and §20(7) separately limits district revenue growth to inflation plus local growth. Both are formulas rather than figures — the rate limit is "the prior year", which is not a constant — and `rate-limit` requires a concrete `maxRate` while `levy-limit` requires a concrete `maxAnnualLevyGrowth`. Supplying either would invent a number. What IS encoded is art. X §11, which is a genuine numeric rate limit on the state levy power. PRODUCING MINES AND OIL AND GAS TAKE NO ASSESSMENT RATIO AT ALL, so they appear in no class row. Their valuation for assessment is defined directly as a share of PRODUCTION: 25% of gross proceeds, or net proceeds if greater, for a producing mine (§39-6-106(2)); 87.5% of the prior year's wellhead selling price for oil and gas leaseholds, 75% for secondary and tertiary recovery (§39-7-102). §39-1-104(1.8)(d) expressly puts both outside the definition of nonresidential property, and `ValuationBasis` has no member for a valuation that is a share of production rather than of value. CITATION HAZARDS SPECIFIC TO COLORADO. dpt.colorado.gov — the Division of Property Taxation, the agency that publishes the year's rates — answers HTTP 403 ("Request blocked", CloudFront) to any non-browser client, so all four DPT citations carry no `contentAssertion` and the origin probe is what keeps them checkable. The Colorado State Publications Library holds dated archive copies of the same brochures, and that is why `spl.cde.state.co.us` is registered: it is the only readable dated copy. Separately, the olls.info CRS PDFs are large enough that this repo's PDF text extractor fails on them — Titles 29 and 39 overflow the call stack and the Constitution volume returns zero characters — so those three citations are deliberately assertion-free and will report `unasserted` rather than passing. That is the honest outcome the assertion mechanism is designed for. DATA STATUS. Every state-level figure here is either statutory text in a year-pinned CRS edition or a rate the Division of Property Taxation publishes for property tax year 2026. The single soft figure is the $56,000 business personal property threshold, which rests on a Legislative Council Staff fiscal note rather than on an administrator's published determination.