How to Find and Cite Colorado Law

Colorado doesn't hand you one regulation at a time. Open 1 CCR 204-10 and the Division of Motor Vehicles vehicle services document comes down as a single PDF, with every provision numbered inside that one file.

Count the Code of Colorado Regulations that way and you get a figure that looks wrong. 1,155 regulation sections, against 35,758 statute sections. Across the 52 US jurisdictions in the same data set, the middle of the pack runs about 0.70 regulation sections for every statute section. Colorado runs about 0.03, the lowest of the lot. (Counts measured 2026-09-18.)

Colorado's rules aren't missing. They're bundled.

The Revisor and the Secretary of State

Colorado splits the job between two offices, and neither one does it the way the other does.

The statutes are the Colorado Revised Statutes, C.R.S. The Revisor of Statutes prepares them inside the Office of Legislative Legal Services, working under the General Assembly's Committee on Legal Services. The General Assembly puts the current text online for free. Want to republish the state's own statutory database? Section 2-5-118 makes you tell the Committee on Legal Services which parts you plan to publish. You also have to say whether you're adding anything of your own, such as source notes, cross references, annotations, tables or indexes.

The regulations are the Code of Colorado Regulations, CCR, and the Secretary of State publishes those. Since 2007 the online version has been the official one. Each published regulation carries a digital certificate stamped with the date and time it was certified, and earlier versions stay available, sorted by effective date, back to 2007.

Rulemaking runs through the Colorado Register, which the Secretary of State puts out on the 10th and the 25th of each month. An agency has twenty days after adopting a rule to file it for publication there. Under section 24-4-103(5), the rule takes effect twenty days after that publication unless its own text names a later date.

Reading a CCR number

"1 CCR 204-10" has three parts and only one of them explains itself.

The 1 is a volume number left over from the printed binders Colorado used to ship. The binders are gone. The number stayed. The 204 is the agency, here the Division of Motor Vehicles, which sits under the Department of Revenue at 200. The 10 picks which of that division's rule documents you want.

So the citation lands you on a document, not on a provision. Inside 1 CCR 204-10 you'll find separately numbered rules on temporary special event plates, fleet registration, the motorist insurance identification database, horseless carriages and plenty more besides. A cite that stops at the CCR number is like a cite that stops at the chapter. You need the rule number from inside the file as well.

That's also why plain text search behaves oddly here. Your search term and the rule you actually want can sit many pages apart in the same document, with a stack of unrelated rules in between.

Citing a Colorado statute

C.R.S. numbers go title, then article, then section. 18-5.5-101 is title 18, the criminal code, article 5.5, computer crime, section 101, definitions.

Watch that middle number. It can carry a decimal. When the legislature needs a new article between 5 and 6, it makes one and calls it 5.5. Anything that parses the middle component as a plain integer drops the point five and lands you somewhere else entirely.

Then there's the year, and Colorado is strict about it. The Court of Appeals citation policy was adopted on November 13, 2025 under C.A.R. 28(e). It sets the form as "§ 13-1-902, C.R.S. 2025". Section symbol, number, then C.R.S., then the year, with no parentheses around it. A footnote says the year should point at the current version unless you meant an older one on purpose. The policy also says failure to follow it can get your brief struck.

Colorado cases have their own format. For opinions announced on or after January 1, 2012, you may use the public domain citation described in Chief Justice Directive 12-01. Smith v. Jones, 2012 CO 22, ¶ 13 for the Supreme Court. Jones v. Smith, 2012 COA 35, ¶¶ 44-45 for the Court of Appeals. Pinpoints are paragraph numbers rather than page numbers, so they hold no matter where you read the opinion. Using it is optional.

The May 15 clock

Colorado builds an expiry date into its rules by statute. People coming from other states rarely see it until it has already happened.

Section 24-4-103(8)(c)(I) is where it lives. Take every rule adopted or amended in the year that runs November 1 through the following October 31. Every one of them expires at 11:59 p.m. on the May 15 after that, unless the General Assembly passes a bill saying otherwise.

That bill goes through every session. Staff at the Office of Legislative Legal Services read every rule an executive agency adopts or amends and ask three questions. Is it inside the agency's rulemaking authority? Is it authorized by statute? Does it conflict with the law? A rule that fails goes to the Committee on Legal Services, gets a public hearing, and can simply be left out of the rule review bill. Left out means it expires on schedule. The statute is careful to add that postponing expiration doesn't count as legislative approval of the rule.

So a Colorado regulation can stop operating without the agency doing anything at all. In the corpus, 763 of the 1,155 regulation sections are in force. 275 are repealed, 98 were recodified, 14 are marked expired, 4 are reserved and 1 was removed.

Pulling one rule, start to finish

Say you have a cite to a Colorado rule and you need the text as it stands.

Pull the CCR document itself, not a search snippet. Find your rule inside it by its own number. Then read the certification stamp, which gives you the date and time that version was certified, and the version list, which gives you the effective dates of everything before it.

Now ask the question the statute forces on you. When was this rule last adopted or amended? If that date falls inside a November-to-October window that hasn't cleared its May 15 yet, the rule is alive on the strength of a bill that may not have passed.

The statutes behave differently

Repealed Colorado statutes stay put. 32,037 statute sections are in force and 3,662 are repealed, with 39 deleted and 20 reserved. A repealed section holds its number and stays in the code, so a search without a status filter pulls it alongside live law. The constitution does the same thing on a smaller scale, 400 sections in force against 12 repealed out of 412. There are another 1,194 court rule sections and 109 attorney general opinions besides.

Which leaves the leading digit. The 1 in 1 CCR 204-10 points at a shelf of binders Colorado stopped printing, and you still can't cite the rule without it.

Facts used

All counts come from the Colorado corpus in Vaquill AI's US primary law data, measured 2026-09-18, across 38,628 Colorado sections.

Priyansh Khodiyar

Co-Founder & CTO

Priyansh leads engineering and AI at Vaquill, from the matter workbench to drafting, document comparison, document matrix, and citation-verified research.