Colorado Property Study Guide

Colorado property law has been rewritten in stages across five legislative sessions, and every one of those rewrites was driven by the same two perils: hail and wildfire. That gives you a useful way to study it. Almost nothing here is a general insurance principle Colorado happens to codify — it is a legislature reacting to catastrophe, and the numbers reflect what a burned-out household actually needs.

Cancellation and nonrenewal — sixty days, and reasons on the face

C.R.S. § 10-4-110.7 gives a homeowner sixty days’ advance notice of cancellation or nonrenewal, by first-class mail to the last address in the insurer’s records, and the notice must specifically state the reasons for the action. Nonpayment shortens it to ten days, still with reasons.

One thing is conspicuously absent and gets tested by negative implication: there is no enumerated list of permitted grounds for cancelling a homeowners policy — unlike auto, where § 10-4-602 closes the list after sixty days. The discipline here is the sixty days and the stated reason, not a list.

Do not over-read that into “no early window at all,” though. Section 10-4-110.7(5) gives the insurer thirty business days from the effective date of conditional coverage to evaluate whether to issue the policy, extendable on an “articulable and reasonable basis,” and the insurer must tell the homeowner what it decided. It is narrower than auto’s sixty days — and it runs on business days, not calendar days — but it exists.

The wildfire package — learn it in pairs

C.R.S. § 10-4-110.8 is the heart of the Colorado property exam, and the trick to it is that almost every figure has a standard version and a wildfire-disaster version.

Additional living expense is twelve months minimum as standard, with a twenty-four-month option the insurer must offer. But for a total loss from a wildfire in a declared disaster, the floor becomes twenty-four months, with two optional six-month extensions where the policyholder acting in good faith hits delays beyond their control.

Contents without an itemised inventory is thirty percent of the contents coverage limit as standard — and sixty-five percent for a wildfire-disaster total loss. The policyholder gets 365 days to submit an inventory, and thirty-six months to submit reconstruction receipts, with two further six-month extensions. Once documentation is in, ALE must be paid within twenty days.

Two rules protect the rebuild itself. Choosing to rebuild in a new location cannot be grounds to deny the cost of building-code upgrades. And from January 1, 2025 the declarations page must state, in bold twelve-point type, whether the consumer purchased or rejected the additional coverages.

The offers an insurer must make

Before any of that matters, § 10-4-110.8(6)(a) requires the insurer to offer extended replacement cost of at least fifty percent of the dwelling limit and law and ordinance coverage of at least twenty percent. Fifty and twenty, in that order — and the declarations-page disclosure exists precisely so a homeowner can see afterwards which of the two they turned down.

Newer still: from July 1, 2026, an insurer using a wildfire risk model must file it with the Division, offer mitigation discounts, send each policyholder an annual written wildfire risk score, and decide an appeal of that score within thirty calendar days (§ 10-4-124).

Availability — the FAIR Plan and the fire-refusal rule

When the admitted market will not write a property risk at all, Colorado now has an answer it did not have three years ago. The Colorado FAIR Plan Association, created by HB23-1288, began writing residential policies on April 10, 2025 and commercial policies on June 17, 2025.

Its terms are deliberately unattractive, because it is a last resort rather than a competitor. Eligibility requires proof that three different insurance companies declined the property. Limits are $750,000 for residential property and contents and $5,000,000 commercial. Coverage is written at actual cash value, not replacement cost, on basic perils — fire, lightning and smoke — with windstorm and hail, explosion, riot, vehicles, volcanic eruption and vandalism available as add-ons. There is no liability coverage at all.

Separately, Regulation 5-1-17 bars an insurer from refusing to issue a fire policy based on the property’s zip code, county, or distance from any wildfire — unless the property sits in an immediately threatened area.

Two things Colorado does not have

Both of these are worth knowing affirmatively, because national material assumes them.

Colorado adopts no standard fire policy. The 165-line form that anchors property questions in many states is not part of Colorado law; the only fire-specific sections of Article 4 concern federally declared disaster areas and FAIR Plan qualification.

Colorado also mandates no appraisal clause. That is not an inference from silence: HB26-1247 would have required homeowners policies issued or renewed after January 1, 2027 to carry a binding appraisal process for disputes over the amount, cause and scope of loss — and the House Business Affairs and Labor Committee postponed it indefinitely in March 2026. A legislature that has to introduce a bill to create a requirement, and then declines to pass it, has told you the requirement does not exist.

Rating

Colorado regulates property rates by open competition (Type II) — insurers file, and no prior approval is required. Only two kinds are enumerated in the prior-approval (Type I) tier under § 10-4-401(3): workers’ compensation pure premium rates filed by a rating organization, and assigned-risk motor vehicle insurance — though the Commissioner keeps a residual power to order other kinds into Type I. Insurer-filed workers’ compensation rates are Type II like everything else.