Travis Bunn
Founder, AppealDesk · Published March 27, 2026 · Updated August 2, 2026
Start your Colorado appeal: Denver County · El Paso County · Arapahoe County · Adams County
Enter your address to see if your home may be overassessed. Takes 60 seconds.
$49 flat fee · No percentage of savings · No hidden costs
Updated August 2026
Here is the answer most heirs are relieved to hear: no. Colorado does not reappraise a home because it changed hands. There is no transfer-triggered reassessment, no uncapping, and no new base value stamped on the deed the way California or Michigan heirs experience. Every property in the state gets revalued on the same biennial clock, in odd-numbered years, whether it sold, transferred through probate, or sat untouched for decades.
And yet the first full tax bill on an inherited Colorado home is often hundreds of dollars higher than the one the decedent was paying. The culprit is almost never the valuation. It is the senior homestead exemption, which quietly dies with the qualifying owner and does not pass to children, siblings, or anyone else except a qualifying surviving spouse.
Understanding that one mechanism, plus where the biennial calendar sits when you inherit, tells you almost everything about what your bill will do next. Six facts frame the whole situation:
Colorado reappraises all real property in odd-numbered years (2025, 2027, and so on). In the even-numbered intervening year, the value simply carries forward unless something physical changed, such as new construction, demolition, a parcel split, or a change in the property's use. County assessors publish this list of unusual conditions, and an ownership change is not on it. A death, a probate distribution, or a trust transfer leaves the assessor's value exactly where it was.
The values themselves also look backward, not at your inheritance date. Under section 39-1-104(10.2), C.R.S., each reappraisal draws from a statutory base period of sales ending June 30 of the year before the reappraisal year. The 2025 and 2026 values, for example, reflect the market as of June 30, 2024. If the market climbed after that date, your inherited home's taxable value has not caught up yet. If it fell, you may be paying taxes on a value the market no longer supports, which is exactly what the protest process exists for.
Colorado's senior homestead exemption, codified at section 39-3-203, C.R.S., removes 50% of the first $200,000 of actual value from taxation. On any home worth $200,000 or more, that is a flat $100,000 of value the county cannot tax.
To qualify, the owner must be 65 or older on January 1 and must have owned and occupied the home as a primary residence for ten consecutive years. Once granted, the exemption stays in place without annual reapplication, which is exactly why so many estates find it still sitting on the tax bill months after the qualifying owner has died.
That ten-year owner-occupancy requirement is why heirs cannot inherit the benefit. Even if you are 66 and move into the house the day probate closes, your clock starts at zero. The exemption belongs to the qualifying senior, not to the property.
A surviving spouse can keep the exemption if all of the following are true:
If you are the adult child, grandchild, or sibling of the decedent, none of this applies to you. The exemption comes off, and the full actual value becomes taxable going forward. County application deadlines matter here too: El Paso County, for example, set July 15 as the deadline to apply for tax year 2026.
A clearly hypothetical example. Say the inherited home has an actual value of $480,000 and sits in a district with 45 school mills and 40 mills of county, city, and special district levies (real mill levies vary widely by county and district):
That is an increase of about $567 a year with no change in the assessor's opinion of value. Heirs who see a jump like this often assume the county reassessed the house at inheritance and look for a reassessment to fight. There is none. The value line on the bill is the same; the exemption line is gone.
In 2024 the legislature passed SB24-111, creating a "qualified-senior primary residence" classification for tax years 2025 and 2026. It lets a senior who already earned the exemption keep an equivalent reduction after moving to a new primary residence, even though the ten-year clock reset. Read it carefully: the portability belongs to the senior who previously qualified. It is not a mechanism for heirs to keep a decedent's exemption on an inherited house.
Enter the Colorado address and we check the county value against the sales data for its base period. Takes 30 seconds.
If you inherited the house recently, the paperwork in the decedent's files may reference three or four different assessment rates. All of them were real at some point. Colorado spent 2023 and 2024 rewriting its property tax math:
For the 2026 tax year, residential property is assessed at 6.25% for local government levies and 7.05% for school district levies. So the single "assessment rate" heirs look for on older tax bills no longer exists; your bill now blends two. When you estimate what an inherited home will cost to hold, run both rates against their respective mill levies, as in the example above.
One more variable: mill levies are set district by district, so two inherited homes with identical values in different parts of the state can carry very different bills. The county treasurer's statement for the parcel lists every levy that applies to that specific address.
Because Colorado revalues everything at once in odd years, what happens to your bill depends on where in the two-year cycle the inheritance lands:
That second scenario is the operational trap. The Notice of Valuation goes to the owner of record's address on file, which is often the decedent's own address or an old mailing address. Estates that have not updated the assessor's records routinely miss the notice entirely, and with it the short protest window. If you are the personal representative or the new owner, updating the mailing address with the county assessor should happen in the first weeks, not after probate wraps.
Colorado enacted an inheritance tax in 1927 and replaced it with an estate tax in 1980. That estate tax was tied to the federal state death tax credit, and when Congress phased that credit out, Colorado's estate tax went with it. For anyone who died after December 31, 2004, there is no Colorado estate tax filing and no payment. Only the federal estate tax can apply, and only to estates above the federal exemption threshold, which the vast majority of Colorado estates never reach.
Do not let that comfort blur into the property tax picture. The annual property tax obligation continues uninterrupted through the estate, and any unpaid balances are a lien the county treasurer will eventually enforce regardless of who inherits. Death taxes and property taxes are separate systems; Colorado waived one and not the other.
Colorado runs a property tax deferral program through the state treasury for homeowners 65 and older and for active military service members. It is easy to misread: the state was not forgiving the decedent's taxes, it was lending them the money, at low simple interest, with the loan secured against the home.
If the person you inherited from was enrolled, that balance does not disappear at death:
Beginning in 2026, county treasurers handle deferral applications and administration, so the county treasurer's office is the right first call. Ask two questions: is there a deferral balance on this parcel, and are any prior-year taxes unpaid? Both are liens that follow the property, not the person, and both should be settled or accounted for before the estate distributes the home.
Inherited homes are unusually good protest candidates, for a reason built into how estates work: many heirs obtain a date-of-death appraisal for the federal stepped-up basis. That is a professional opinion of market value, often the strongest single piece of evidence a homeowner can bring, and most protesting owners never have one. If the appraisal comes in below the assessor's actual value, you already have the core of a case. Just remember the assessor values as of the base-period appraisal date (June 30 of the year before the reappraisal year), so evidence closest to that date carries the most weight.
The path and deadlines, which apply to an inherited home the same as any other:
Our Colorado appeal guide walks through the full protest process, county by county, including where to file online and what each county's CBOE expects.
Base-period comparable sales, the June 8 filing steps, and a cover letter, assembled for the county the home sits in.
None of the steps below require probate to be finished, and several protect deadlines that will not wait for it:
Inheriting a Colorado home does not reset its taxable value, and no death tax applies. What changes is eligibility: the senior exemption comes off unless a qualifying surviving spouse remains, any deferral loan comes due, and the biennial reappraisal keeps running on its own schedule regardless of what the estate is doing.
Treat the property tax file as part of settling the estate. Update the addresses, account for the exemption and any deferral, and put May 1 and June 8 on the calendar for every year you hold the property. The heirs who get burned are almost never the ones who misunderstood the law; they are the ones who never saw the notice.
Yes. The exemption is personal to the qualifying senior, and eligibility ended when they passed unless a qualifying surviving spouse still occupies the home. Notify the county assessor of the ownership change rather than letting the exemption ride; counties reconcile exemption rolls against ownership records, and it is far better to have the removal dated correctly than to have the county unwind it later.
2026 is an intervening year, so the value carries forward from the 2025 reappraisal unless the property itself changed. You can still protest that carried-forward value in any year, during the May 1 to June 8 window. The next statewide reappraisal takes effect in 2027, with Notices of Valuation mailed by May 1, 2027, reflecting the market over the base period ending June 30, 2026, and the same June 8 protest deadline applies.
Yes, and you should. A professional appraisal is strong evidence of market value. Keep the dates straight, though: the assessor's value is pegged to the base-period appraisal date (June 30 of the year before the reappraisal year), not the date of death. If the two dates are far apart, pair the appraisal with sales from the base period to bridge the gap.
No. Colorado replaced its inheritance tax with an estate tax in 1980, and that estate tax stopped applying to deaths after December 31, 2004, when the federal credit it was built on disappeared. No Colorado death-tax filing is required. Ongoing property taxes, however, continue and become the responsibility of the estate and then the new owner.
Not yet. The exemption requires ten consecutive years of owning and occupying the home as your primary residence, and your ten-year clock starts when you take ownership and move in. The SB24-111 portability classification only helps seniors who had already earned the exemption on a prior home of their own. Mark the calendar for the year you hit ten years, then apply through your county assessor.
The deferred taxes are a state loan secured by the home, so the balance rides with the property until a disqualifying event triggers repayment. In practice the estate typically repays it from estate funds or from sale proceeds before the home is distributed. A surviving spouse who is at least 60 and on the title can request that the state treasury continue the deferral instead. Get the exact payoff figure from the county treasurer before making distribution decisions.