Contractor License & Permit Bonds in Colorado

Colorado licenses no contractors statewide — and unlike Montana, it says so in statute and hands the job to the cities in writing

C.R.S. Title 12, “Professions and Occupations,” runs to forty-four articles, and not one of them is contractors or construction. The nearest neighbors are Article 115 electricians, Article 155 plumbers, and Article 120 engineers, surveyors and architects. The state’s own regulator agrees: the Division of Professions and Occupations lists exactly four non-health programs — accountancy, barber and cosmetology, electrical and plumbing — and inside them exactly two contractor credentials, “Electrical Contractor” and “Plumbing Contractor.” The Secretary of State’s index of every board holding rulemaking authority names a State Electrical Board and a State Plumbing Board, and no contractor board at all.

And the state licenses those two trades and bonds neither. Article 115 is 104,075 characters with zero “bond” and zero “surety”; Article 155 is 102,327 characters with the same two zeros; and the umbrella articles both of them incorporate — Articles 1 and 20 — carry no bond either, so there is nothing to inherit. If you are being offered a “Colorado contractor license bond” as a state requirement, there is no state requirement behind it.

What makes Colorado different from the other no-state-license states in this directory is that it does not merely leave the ground vacant — it hands it over expressly. C.R.S. 12-155-121(1): “Any city, town, county, or city and county of this state may provide for the licensing of plumbing contractors or water conditioning contractors,” with only a floor at subsection (2), which stops a local government from writing rules that would preclude a state licensee from practicing their trade. Montana’s statute (MCA 37-45-204) does the opposite and makes the municipal pattern unlawful. Colorado authorizes it. That single sentence is why every license bond on this page has a city, a county or a district on the other end of it — and note the phrase “city and county,” the Colorado term of art that means Denver and Broomfield.

Denver is the anchor: seven license classes, seven bonds, one sentence — and the article offers no alternative to a surety

Denver’s contractor licensing does not live in its buildings chapter. It lives in Chapter 49 — Streets, Sidewalks and Other Public Ways, Article XVII, because the whole scheme is a right-of-way scheme: § 49-586 applies the article to “contractors performing work in public ways and places.” Every bond section in the article uses the same sentence, changing only the trade and the sum — a bond “with some reliable surety company to be approved by the manager of transportation and infrastructure in the sum of” the stated figure, conditioned on complying with the manager’s requirements and the city’s code, “including the payment of all fees, penalties or cost of repairs.”

The general contractor license bond is $50,000 (§ 49-598), and it sits at the top of the scheme: a general contractor licensed under division 2 is not required to hold any of the other six licenses. Below it, the structural contractor bond is $25,000 (§ 49-608), the sewer contractor bond $50,000 (§ 49-618), the paving contractor bond $50,000 (§ 49-628), the special contractor bond $10,000 (§ 49-638), and the sidewalk and driveway contractor bond $10,000 (§ 49-648). Alongside them the excavator’s license bond is $50,000 (§ 49-200(b)) and covers street cuts, though a paving licensee is expressly exempt from needing it.

Two of those classes answer questions people arrive with. The paving license covers “street or alley paving” in one credential — there is no separate Denver alley-paving license, and the figure sometimes attached to one belongs to nothing. And water lines and sprinkling systems are inside the special contractor’s scope at $10,000; there is no Denver water-service contractor license, and Denver Water, which is a separate charter agency with its own board, licenses water users rather than contractors and requires no contractor bond in its operating rules.

One more Denver bond sits outside Chapter 49 and off every list we were given. The sewer layer license bond is $1,000 under Chapter 56 (§ 56-68), and the ordinance is unusual in printing the entire bond form inline — naming a company “duly qualified under the laws of the State of Colorado as a surety company,” making the bond continuous, cancellable only on ninety days’ notice, and keeping the surety answerable for claims already accrued. A plumber licensed by the state is exempt from that license.

The Front Range splits into two camps — and in the second one there is no surety bond to buy at all

Once you leave Denver, Colorado’s metros divide cleanly, and which camp your city is in matters more than any amount on this page.

The first camp bonds the contractor. Aurora requires $20,000 of right-of-way contractors — exactly one bond across roughly twenty-five license types on the city’s own schedule, valid two years and renewed annually thereafter. Arvada requires $20,000 for its municipal general contractor license, codified since 2021 at § 78-185 and posted on a city-prepared form, and it is a blanket bond by design — the form’s own recital says the principal deposits it in lieu of separate bonds for each public improvement. Fort Collins is the largest municipal requirement in this directory: $100,000 for a right-of-way license, and $250,000 if you are boring for utilities in the public right-of-way. It is also the only municipal bond in this directory that sets a rating floor — § 15-363 requires the bond to be executed by a reliable surety company rated “A-” or better, wants the original certificate or an electronically sealed file rather than a copy, and keeps the bond effective through the warranty period even after cancellation.

The second camp took the surety out. Several of Colorado’s largest suburbs will not accept a surety bond for right-of-way work, by name. Lakewood takes $10,000 in cash or an irrevocable letter of credit on the annual permit and the same two instruments on an individual one. Longmont names a cash deposit or an irrevocable letter of credit, and the director only may require it at all. Wheat Ridge is headed “License and permit bond” but calls for a cash bond whose amount the director sets annually, with an insurance company bond merely permitted as a substitute. Greeley names four cash forms first and offers the bond only “in lieu of” them. Thornton lets the city choose among cash, a letter of credit, a performance bond, or simply withholding building permits. And Westminster is the plainest of all: its code defines “Surety” to mean the performance guarantee required of the contractor and says the city accepts a letter of credit or a cash escrow “without exception,” while the city’s own right-of-way page tells Class D and Class E public way contractors that “bonds are not allowed.” If you are working in those cities, you do not need a surety bond — you need the instrument they actually take, and none of them is on this page.

Between the two camps sits a third pattern, and it is one drafted sentence doing the work in five suburbs. Englewood, Cripple Creek, Cherry Hills Village, Greenwood Village and Lafayette all sit under a catchline naming both halves — “performance bonds and letters of credit” — and all carry the same words: the applicant files a bond or a letter of credit, at the applicant’s choice, in an amount equal to the total cost of construction or a stated floor, whichever is greater. Five separate listings, one sentence, and two reasons no figure can be printed: you may not be buying a bond at all, and if you are, the job sizes it.

Beyond the Front Range, the amounts are small, fixed, and stated in the ordinance — and one widely circulated figure is wrong

Colorado Springs licenses two trades and bonds each at $5,000, and it proves they are separate instruments by publishing a separate captioned form for each: a concrete contractor license bond under City Code 3.3.5 and an excavation license bond under 3.3.2. Both forms run to “the City of Colorado Springs, Colorado, a home rule city and Colorado municipal corporation, as Obligee,” and both name a corporation authorized to do business in Colorado as surety. Pueblo does the same thing two titles apart — $5,000 for the sidewalk, driveway, curb and gutter permit (§ 12-3-31(f)) and $5,000 for street excavation (§ 12-6-10) — while bonding none of its building trades: all fourteen chapters of Pueblo’s building regulations title, electrical and plumbing included, contain zero “bond.”

Durango requires $5,000 before a general business license issues (§ 13-92), and one warning about reading it: the section requires the bond “as required in article V, section 21-68,” and § 21-68 is now “Police powers.” Renumbering left a live ordinance pointing at the wrong section. Follow the requirement, not the pointer. Broomfield — the state’s other city and county — requires $5,000 to move a building, good for one year (§ 12-24-040).

And one figure in circulation is simply wrong. Palisade is widely listed at $5,000. Its ordinance says otherwise: § 11-44 requires “a bond in the amount of two thousand dollars ($2,000.00)” and adds that the bond “shall have as a surety a corporation licensed to do business in the State as a surety company.” The correct figure is $2,000, it is surety-only, and the whole streets chapter contains no cash, escrow or letter-of-credit alternative. If you were quoted against $5,000 in Palisade, you were quoted against the wrong number.

The well and pump board, and why we quote it rather than publish a number — the tri-state contrast in one requirement

Colorado’s one genuine state-board requirement for a construction trade belongs to water well construction and pump installation contractors, licensed by the Board of Examiners in the Division of Water Resources. It is real, it is mandatory, and it is not a bond requirement. C.R.S. 37-91-107 asks for evidence of financial responsibility and then lists the ways to give it: a savings account, a deposit or a certificate of deposit first; an irrevocable letter of credit second; and an approved compliance bond with a corporate surety last. The board’s own rule puts the alternatives under a heading reading “Alternative Funds.” Where the cash route is named first and the bond last, the number is not the price of a bond — it is the size of a security you may satisfy several ways.

There is a second reason no figure appears, and it is the more instructive one. The statute expressly authorizes the board to set the bond amounts higher than the printed figures when it needs to, and the board has already done it — so the number in the statute is not the number you file. A researcher reading only the statute, a primary source, current and correctly cited, would publish a superseded figure. That is why this page tells you what the requirement is and confirms the amount when you apply.

It is worth seeing the same trade across three neighboring states, because the words and the answers come apart. Montana bonds it, then names four cash equivalents in the same sentence. Wyoming does not bond it at all — its statute asks for financial responsibility “including proof of general liability insurance,” which is insurance, not surety. Colorado uses Wyoming’s phrase and reaches Montana’s answer: it calls the duty evidence of financial responsibility and resolves it into a bond-or-cash election. Three states, two vocabularies, no shared instrument.

The counties, the districts, and the state highway permit — where the amount depends on the job

Colorado’s sanitation districts license the contractors who work inside them, and three of the four publish a figure. Bancroft-Clover requires a $5,000 surety bond with the annual contractor license; Bear Creek requires $10,000 with a corporate surety approved by the board and a power of attorney attached, and revokes the license for any lapse of the bond; and Southwest Metropolitan requires $10,000 — and note the name, because it is a drain layer and plumber license bond rather than the right-of-way bond it is sometimes listed as. Green Mountain requires its contractors to be bonded and states no sum anywhere in its rules, so we quote it.

Two counties bond right-of-way work, and both are listed rather than published for the same kind of reason. Arapahoe County writes one non-cancelable permit bond with two bases for the sum in a single sentence — a flat figure, or the estimated cost of the public improvements you currently have permitted or under warranty — and publishes no rule for choosing between them. El Paso County certifies rather than licenses its right-of-way contractors, by written examination in earthwork, concrete and asphalt, and requires a general permit bond stated as a minimum; its Engineering Criteria Manual separately names cash deposits and assigned savings alongside bonds as acceptable types of surety, and leaves type and amount to the ECM Administrator where a standard does not fix them.

At the state level, the State Highway Access Code lets the department require security where access work means reconstructing a roadway open to travel — and the Access Code is one of the few in this directory that names the contractor as a possible principal in its own words, “the permittee or permittee’s contractor.” It is quoted rather than priced for three reasons at once: the department may require it, the Code offers a bond, an escrow account “or in some other manner” of providing security, and the amount is whatever is sufficient to cover the work as the department determines.

What renders with a number here, and what does not

Twenty-two of the forty-four Colorado bonds on this page carry a published amount, and twenty-two do not. The line between them is not how confident we are — it is what the obligee actually wrote. A figure appears when a code section, a board rule or the obligee’s own published bond form states a single fixed sum and offers no non-surety instrument in its place. Denver’s seven classes qualify because the ordinance states each sum and the article contains no cash, deposit, letter-of-credit or escrow route; Fort Collins qualifies twice; Colorado Springs and Pueblo qualify because each city publishes a captioned bond form per trade.

A bond is listed without a figure when any one of four things is true: the amount is a formula or a percentage of the work rather than a sum, the obligee sizes it case by case, the requirement is discretionary, or the code offers a non-surety substitute — cash, a deposit, an escrow, a letter of credit — alongside the bond. Where you may satisfy the requirement without buying a bond at all, printing a bond amount would be misleading, so we do not print one. Those pages tell you who requires it, what it secures and where the authority sits, and the amount is confirmed against the obligee when you request a quote.

Every Colorado bond on this page is quoted rather than issued from an instant online portal — a deliberate choice, including for the fixed municipal amounts. Tell us the city, county or district and the work you are permitted for, and a licensed producer follows up with the bond and confirms the amount against the obligee. Request a quote on any Colorado bond page or from the form on this page.