Colorado Property Tax Appeal Success Rates by County: The 2025 Results

Colorado's county boards of equalization closed their 2025 sessions last year. Every petition they decided — the value protested, the outcome, the final number — is public record, spread across county petition reports, hearing-officer records, and, in one county, a records request. We compiled the Front Range's results into one dataset: more than 12,000 decided petitions across eight counties: the 7,396 commercial petitions in the table below, 3,373 decided residential-classified petitions in Adams, Larimer, Denver, and Douglas, and El Paso County’s hearing-officer records, which support the value-based read covered separately.

Two findings matter more than the rest. The county-to-county spread is enormous. And the single strongest predictor of winning was not the county or the property type — it was whether anyone argued the case at all.

A 7× spread between neighboring counties

Larimer County owners won a reduction in 44% of decided commercial petitions. Adams County owners won 6%. Those counties share a border.

The honest explanation is not that one board is generous and the other cruel. It is that the filing mix is different. Adams County's decided pool is dominated by high-volume filings that were never individually argued; in Larimer, the great majority of petitions get an individual hearing on the merits, and its filers self-select accordingly. Notice the counter-signal in the medians: Adams County's winners took the largest median cut on the Front Range (13.2%) — when a case was actually made there, the board moved as far as any in the region. The rate tells you who files. The median tells you what a real case is worth.

The gap that should change how you appeal: argued vs. waived

Douglas County's petition report codes something most counties don’t publish: which petitions were disposed of as Administrative Denials — no appearance, no evidence argued, the petition simply passed through. In 2025, 63% of Douglas County's decided commercial petitions ended that way.

Now split the success rate. Of the 115 commercial petitions the board actually heard, 78 won a reduction — 67.8%. The petitions whose hearings were waived won, by definition, nothing at the county level — their fight, if anyone continued it, moved to the state Board of Assessment Appeals, and had to be perfected there within 30 days of the county decision. Blend them together and Douglas County reports a 24.8% success rate. Separate them and the story is unmistakable:

To be clear about what a waiver is and isn’t: for Colorado’s largest filers, waiving the county hearing and negotiating at the state board is a deliberate, legitimate strategy — and as we showed in our state-board analysis, most commercial cases that reach the BAA do eventually settle. The danger isn’t the managed waiver. It’s the unmanaged one: a petition waived at the county and never perfected upstairs, or perfected and then parked while two years of bills issue on the untested number. I have argued these hearings for a decade; boards do not move value for an empty chair. If you engaged representation in 2025, the one question the data says to ask is simple: was our hearing argued — and if it was waived, what happened next?

Success rates by property type

Denver's records classify every parcel, which lets us cut the city's 2025 outcomes by property type:

Hotels led Denver's commercial classes — a small cohort (46 decided), but consistent with what we see statewide: room revenue flattened against assessments that extrapolated the recovery, and the income approach can't ignore it. Office and retail filed the most and won the least often, but with the largest median cuts when they did win: fewer cases had evidence behind them, and the ones that did had a lot of ground to cover.

El Paso County's hearing-officer records support a value-based read (a final value below the protested value, withdrawn petitions excluded) — not directly comparable to the decision-coded table above. On that basis, office petitions won 56% of the time with a median winning cut of 15.8%, and warehouse and industrial won 45% with a median cut of 16.5% — the deepest winning reductions on the Front Range.

What the medians say about 2027

Set the rates aside and look at what winners won: 13.2% in Adams, 12.9% in Jefferson, 11.9% in Larimer, 11.4% on Denver office and retail, 15%+ in El Paso. On a $10 million commercial property at typical Front Range levies, a median-sized win is worth roughly $25,000–$45,000 of tax per year — and because Colorado assesses in two-year cycles, a 2027 win normally rides into 2028 untouched.

The 2027 reassessment prices every property off sales through June 30, 2026 — the data is already fixed. Notices mail May 1, 2027, and under Colorado's appeal calendar protests are due June 1 — a week earlier than the June 8 deadline longtime owners remember, moved up by SB26-046 effective with the 2027 cycle. The 2025 record says the owners who win are the ones whose cases are built and argued, not merely filed. Ten months is enough time to be in the first group. (One practitioner’s footnote: if you never protested 2025 at all, the abatement process under §39-10-114 can still reach those years — but owners who protested to a decision are generally barred from re-arguing value there. Which door is open depends on what your file says happened.)

And if a consultant quotes you a success rate — theirs or these — read our companion piece on what a win rate actually measures. County success rates measure the filing mix. Consultant win rates measure the intake filter. The number that matters is whether your property's value can be defended with evidence, at a hearing, by someone who shows up.