Colorado Late Fee Laws: The Landlord and Tenant Guide

Colorado is one of the most tenant-protective states in the country for late rent fees, and it got there fast. In 2021 the legislature passed Senate Bill 21-173, which added a hard late-fee statute with effect from October 1 of that year. The result, now codified at Colorado Revised Statutes section 38-12-105, does three things at once: it grants every residential tenant and mobile-home owner a mandatory seven-calendar-day grace period, it caps the late fee at the greater of fifty dollars or 5% of the past-due rent, and it forbids a landlord from ever evicting a tenant just for failing to pay a late fee. Those bright-line rules — not a vague reasonableness test — drive everything on this page.

This guide walks the full framework in plain English: exactly how much a landlord may charge, when the seven-day grace period starts and how it is counted, why the fee must be disclosed in the lease and asserted within one hundred eighty days, the separate returned-check remedy, and the critical point that a late fee is not rent for Colorado’s ten-day demand for rent or possession. It also covers the special cases — mobile-home parks, subsidized housing — local ordinances, how a tenant recovers a statutory penalty when a landlord breaks the rules, a practical playbook for both sides, real scenarios, and a Colorado-specific FAQ.

Because Colorado wrote its late-fee rules into a single statute with real numbers and real penalties, the safest posture for a landlord is strict compliance with the checklist, and the strongest position for a tenant is knowing that an overcharge, an early fee, or a fee used to threaten eviction is not just unenforceable but can trigger a penalty payable to the tenant. Treat every figure here as a starting point and verify the current statute before you charge, pay, or dispute a fee.

Before diving into the numbers, it helps to see exactly what Colorado law controls. A late fee is not rent. It is a contractual charge a landlord seeks to add when rent arrives late, and until 2021 Colorado left that charge almost entirely to the lease. That changed with Senate Bill 21-173, which created a dedicated late-fee statute with effect from October 1, 2021. Today the governing rule lives in Colorado Revised Statutes section 38-12-105, and it treats a late fee as a tightly regulated charge with fixed limits rather than a matter of private contract.

So the narrow legal question in Colorado is not “what is a reasonable late fee?” the way it is in some states. The statute already answers the amount and the timing. The real questions are: has rent been late for at least seven calendar days, is the fee disclosed in the lease, and does it stay at or below the greater of fifty dollars or 5% of the past-due rent? If all three are true, the fee is generally valid. If any one fails, the fee is unlawful, and the tenant has a statutory remedy. Everything else on this page — the eviction bar, the interest ban, the returned-check rule — orbits those bright lines.

This makes Colorado unusually predictable. A landlord complies by staying inside the numbers, and a tenant can check compliance with arithmetic rather than argument. The statute deliberately removed the guesswork, and in doing so it shifted the risk: a landlord who ignores the checklist is not merely holding an unenforceable fee but is exposed to a penalty the tenant can collect.

For residential rent, the answer is an emphatic yes. Colorado Revised Statutes section 38-12-105 provides that a landlord may not charge a tenant or mobile-home owner a late fee unless the rent payment is late by at least seven calendar days. This is a mandatory, state-created grace period. It is not something the tenant has to negotiate into the lease, and a lease cannot shorten it. Rent may be due on the first, but a late fee cannot attach until the payment is at least seven calendar days overdue, which in an ordinary month means the earliest a late fee can appear is the eighth.

The count is in calendar days, not business days, so weekends and holidays are included and do not push the deadline out. That cuts both ways: a tenant does not get extra time because the seventh day lands on a Sunday, and a landlord cannot start the clock earlier by excluding weekends. The seven-day floor is the same whether the property is a downtown Denver apartment, a single-family rental on the Western Slope, or a mobile-home lot — the statute grants the grace period across the board.

A Landlord May Give More, Never Less

Seven calendar days is a floor, not a ceiling. A landlord is free to write a longer grace period into the lease — ten days, or “no late fee if paid by the fifteenth” — and many do as a courtesy or to reduce disputes. What a landlord cannot do is charge a late fee before the seventh calendar day, no matter what the lease says. A lease clause purporting to allow a fee on the second or third day of the month is unenforceable to the extent it conflicts with the statutory grace period, and charging under it is a prohibited act.

This is the heart of Colorado late-fee law. Under Colorado Revised Statutes section 38-12-105, a late fee may not exceed the greater of fifty dollars or 5% of the amount of the past-due rent payment. Because the statute uses “greater of,” the tenant is charged whichever of the two figures is larger, and that larger figure is the ceiling. This is a true statutory cap, not a reasonableness standard: a landlord who charges above it has violated the law even if the lease authorizes a higher number and even if the landlord’s real costs were higher.

Working the arithmetic makes the rule concrete. On past-due rent of one thousand dollars, 5% is fifty dollars, so the cap is fifty dollars — the two figures are equal. On past-due rent of two thousand dollars, 5% is one hundred dollars, and because one hundred is greater than fifty, the cap is one hundred dollars. On a small past-due amount where 5% would come out to only twenty or thirty dollars, the landlord may still charge up to fifty dollars, because fifty is the greater figure. The floor of the cap is effectively fifty dollars, and it rises with 5% only once the past-due rent crosses one thousand dollars.

A late fee cannot appear out of thin air in Colorado. To be enforceable at all, the fee must be disclosed in the rental agreement. Colorado Revised Statutes section 38-12-105 provides that a landlord may not require a tenant or mobile-home owner to pay a late fee unless the late fee is disclosed in the rental agreement. If the lease is silent on late fees, there is simply no late fee to collect. A landlord cannot invent a late fee that the lease never mentions, cannot spring one on the tenant mid-tenancy without a proper new agreement, and cannot charge more than the lease provides — or more than the statutory cap, whichever is lower.

Timing then layers on top of disclosure. Even a properly disclosed fee cannot be charged until the rent is at least seven calendar days late, because the grace period is mandatory. And Colorado adds a second timing rule that catches many landlords off guard: the statute bars charging a late fee unless the landlord gave the tenant written notice of the late fee within one hundred eighty days after the date the rent payment was due. A landlord who lets six months pass and then tries to bill a stale late fee has lost the right to collect it. Disclosure, the seven-day grace period, and the one-hundred-eighty-day notice window are three separate gates, and the fee must clear all three.

A bounced rent check in Colorado is governed by Colorado Revised Statutes section 13-21-109, and that statute gives the holder of the check a choice among remedies, never a sum of them. Subsection (1) provides that a person who makes payment of an obligation by a check that is not paid upon its presentment is liable to the holder, or to an assignee for collection, “for one of the following amounts, at the option of the holder or assignee.” A landlord holding a returned rent check elects one branch of section 13-21-109. The branches do not stack, and no branch is automatic.

The branches are these. Under subsection (1)(a), the face amount of the check plus actual damages under the Uniform Commercial Code, title 4. Under subsection (1)(b), the face amount together with any reasonable posted or contractual charge not exceeding twenty dollars — and, only where the check has been assigned to a licensed collection agency, twenty percent of the face amount but not less than twenty dollars as costs of collection. Under subsection (1)(c), the amount described in subsection (2). Twenty dollars is a ceiling on the (1)(b) charge, not a fee the state hands every landlord: the charge must already have been posted or written into the rental agreement, so a landlord who never posted it and never put it in the lease recovers nothing on that branch.

The statute does reach a residential landlord. The only carve-out in subsection (1) is an obligation on a consumer credit transaction as defined in section 5-1-301, and that term covers a consumer credit sale, a consumer loan, or a consumer lease — a lease of goods. Residential rent is not a consumer credit transaction, so a landlord holding a bounced rent check is a holder within section 13-21-109. The section is also purely civil: subsection (8) provides that nothing in it applies to any criminal case. A dishonored rent check gives a landlord a civil claim against the writer; it is not a criminal matter the landlord prosecutes, and nothing in the section lets a landlord fix a penalty on its own say-so.

The treble amount is a court judgment, not a fee. Subsection (2)(a) applies instead of the amounts set forth in paragraph (a) or (b) of subsection (1): if written notice of nonpayment is given in the form subsections (3) and (4) require, and the total amount stated in that notice is not paid within fifteen days after the notice is given, the check writer is liable for three times the face amount of the check but not less than one hundred dollars. Because it is an alternative, a landlord who takes the twenty-dollar posted-or-contractual charge is on branch (1)(b) and does not also collect three times the check. The additional actual-damages language in subsection (2)(a), which mentions associated late fees, is aimed at a dishonored paycheck, not at rent.

Two limits matter more here than the multiplier does. First, subsection (4)(e) requires the demand notice to state an itemized total that shall not exceed the amount permitted under paragraph (a) or (b) of subsection (1) — so the written demand may claim the face amount and the twenty-dollar charge, and the treble figure may never appear in it. Second, subsection (5) provides that no holder or assignee for collection shall assert that any maker has liability for any amount set forth under subsection (2) unless that liability has been determined by entry of a final judgment by a court of competent jurisdiction. A Colorado landlord may not post three times the check to a tenant ledger, may not demand it, and may not label it an NSF fee; the landlord must sue and prevail first.

Costs and fees run both ways. Subsection (6) says that in any civil action brought under this section the prevailing party may recover court costs and reasonable attorney fees — a discretionary award, running to whichever side wins, which is exactly what the statute’s own prescribed notice language at subsection (4)(g) tells the check writer. It is not a landlord entitlement, and a tenant who defeats the claim may recover costs and fees from the landlord. The check writer also has real defenses: subsection (2)(b) supplies six complete defenses to the treble amount, including that the account contained sufficient funds when the check was written and that the underlying transaction lacked consideration or was illegal, and subsection (7) takes section 13-21-109 out of play altogether where the writer stopped payment by reason of a dispute relating to the money, merchandise, property, or other thing of value obtained.

Keep this election separate from the late-fee rules. A returned rent check can carry both a section 13-21-109 remedy and a section 38-12-105 late fee, because the check also leaves the rent unpaid and late; the choice a landlord must make is within section 13-21-109, between its own branches, and not between the returned-check charge and the late fee.

This is where Colorado’s tenant protections are at their sharpest. A landlord who wants to evict for nonpayment serves a ten-day demand for rent or possession under Colorado Revised Statutes section 13-40-104 for most residential tenancies. That demand is for unpaid rent, and a late fee is not rent. Colorado Revised Statutes section 38-12-105 goes further and flatly prohibits a landlord from removing or excluding a tenant, terminating a tenancy, or initiating a court process against a tenant solely because the tenant failed to pay one or more late fees. Unpaid late fees, standing alone, can never be the basis for an eviction in Colorado.

That means two things. First, a landlord must not fold a late fee into the rent figure in a ten-day demand; the demand should state the exact past-due rent and nothing else, and overstating it by adding a late fee can defeat the case, a point our Colorado eviction notice laws guide covers in depth. Second, because the eviction bar in section 38-12-105 is independent of the notice rules, even a tenant who has genuinely refused to pay a valid late fee cannot be evicted for that refusal. The home is not on the line over a late fee.

That does not make a valid late fee uncollectible. It means the collection path is different. A landlord may pursue an unpaid, capped, and disclosed late fee as an ordinary debt — in small claims court, for example, or by deducting it from the security deposit at move-out if the lease allows and the fee is va