Does the deposit have to be in an interest-bearing account in Colorado?

No statute addresses whether the account must bear interest.

What happens if a landlord does not pay deposit interest in Colorado?

No statutory penalty reaches an interest violation specifically.

Do any cities or counties in Colorado have their own deposit-interest rules?

Colorado's silence is not the whole answer in Boulder: the city's own code requires interest on residential security deposits, including pet deposits, at a rate the city publishes each year under a code-mandated formula, with the rate in force at lease signing governing that lease. Boulder is the only Colorado locality with such a duty in this collection, and it is answered in its own record.

Does a landlord have to pay interest on a security deposit in Colorado?

Verified August 28, 2026 All Colorado topics →

Enacted but not yet in force. This page reflects the law in force today. The following measure has been signed and takes effect on the date shown:

SB26-054 (2026) — Already CHAPTERED: on and after January 1, 2027, post-closing occupancy agreements (home-seller rent-backs) become exempt from the two-month security deposit cap of § 38-12-102.5. No other change to the cap. Status: Signed 2026-04-20; the act took effect August 12, 2026, and the exemption itself operates on and after January 1, 2027 per the amended statute's own text. The figures shown do not yet reflect it. (checked August 12, 2026).

Colorado requires no interest on a residential security deposit, and the legislature's recent work on the subject makes that a current answer rather than a stale one.

Cited to Colo. Rev. Stat. § 38-12-103 (return of security deposit, as rewritten effective January 1, 2026) (1), (4) and 3 more cited sources · Verified August 28, 2026

The deposit rules sit in title 38, article 12, part 1. House Bill 25-1249 rewrote the central return provision, § 38-12-103, effective January 1, 2026, adding eight new subsections on deadlines, itemization, and damages, and adding no interest duty; Senate Bill 26-054, effective August 12, 2026, amended the two-month deposit maximum in § 38-12-102.5 and added none either. Part 1 uses the word 'interest' three times and never in a monetary sense — the declaration protects 'the interests of tenants, mobile home owners, and landlords,' and § 38-12-103(4) twice describes a landlord's ownership interest passing to a successor. The part imposes no escrow, trust, or separate-account duty on an ordinary residential deposit either; a landlord may hold the money wherever the lease and general law allow. Mobile home park lot tenancies are governed by part 2 and come out differently on both questions: § 38-12-207(3) requires the park landlord to deposit each security deposit 'into a separate trust account to be administered by the landlord as a private trustee' without commingling, and then says in terms that 'the landlord may keep the interest and profits earned from the corpus as compensation for administering the trust account.'

Colorado deposit interest at a glance

Interest owed to the tenant	No — no statute addresses it
How the rate is set	No rate exists — there is no interest duty
Current figure	No published figure exists
Rate rules	No rate rules — no duty exists
Accrual and payment	No payment duty exists
Who and what is covered	No statutory conditions stated — see the summary and notes
Statute controls where or how the deposit is held	No statute addresses how the deposit is held
Interest-bearing account required	No statute addresses whether the account must bear interest
Custody rules	No statute addresses custody of the deposit
Penalty for violation	No statutory penalty reaches an interest violation specifically
Local rules	Colorado's silence is not the whole answer in Boulder: the city's own code requires interest on residential security deposits, including pet deposits, at a rate the city publishes each year under a code-mandated formula, with the rate in force at lease signing governing that lease. Boulder is the only Colorado locality with such a duty in this collection, and it is answered in its own record.

Cite this page: "Landlord Atlas, Colorado Security Deposit Interest Laws (verified August 28, 2026), landlordatlas.com/laws/deposit-interest/colorado/" — free to cite and quote with a link (how these records are verified). Everything above is cited in the citations section below.

Check the verified Colorado answer — and every state and city that differs — in the deposit interest calculator — free, no signup, built on the same verified Colorado law as this page.

City and county deposit-interest pages in Colorado

Boulder — its own local interest rule

Notes and caveats

A 2025 rewrite that deliberately added nothing — House Bill 25-1249, chapter 401 of the 2025 session laws, is the most substantial rework of Colorado's deposit-return provision in decades: it amended subsections (1), (2), (3), the introduction to (4) and (7), and added new subsections (1.5), (2.5), (3.5), and (8) through (12), all effective January 1, 2026. A legislature that reopened the section that thoroughly and wrote no interest requirement into it left the question answered.
Park lots have a trust account, and the earnings go to the landlord — Section 38-12-207 caps a mobile home park lot deposit at one month's rent, makes the deposit 'the property of the home owner,' and requires a separate trust account administered by the landlord as a private trustee, with no commingling 'for the purpose of preserving the corpus.' The same subsection then allocates what the corpus earns to the landlord as compensation for administering the account. So the park rule is stricter than the general rule on custody and expressly negative on interest, where the general rule is silent on both.
The two parts interlock, so the distinction has to be drawn carefully — Section 38-12-102(2) defines 'landlord' for part 1 to include the management or landlord of a mobile home park, so part 1's return and damages rules can reach a park while part 2 supplies the lot-deposit trust rule. A summary that reports a single Colorado answer without saying which tenancy it describes will be wrong for one of them.
No custody duty for an ordinary tenancy — Sections 38-12-101 through 38-12-104 contain no occurrence of 'escrow,' 'commingle,' 'separate,' or 'accrue,' and the one appearance of 'account' in the printed title is in a case annotation using the word as a verb. Colorado tells a landlord when to give the money back, not where to keep it.

Common questions: Colorado deposit interest

Each answer is the verified value from the table above, restated as a direct answer. Free to quote with a link to this page.

What is the Colorado security deposit interest rate right now?: No published figure exists.
When must a landlord pay or credit deposit interest in Colorado?: No payment duty exists.
Does the deposit have to be in an interest-bearing account in Colorado?: No statute addresses whether the account must bear interest.
What happens if a landlord does not pay deposit interest in Colorado?: No statutory penalty reaches an interest violation specifically.
Do any cities or counties in Colorado have their own deposit-interest rules?: Colorado's silence is not the whole answer in Boulder: the city's own code requires interest on residential security deposits, including pet deposits, at a rate the city publishes each year under a code-mandated formula, with the rate in force at lease signing governing that lease. Boulder is the only Colorado locality with such a duty in this collection, and it is answered in its own record.

Citations

Colo. Rev. Stat. § 38-12-103 (return of security deposit, as rewritten effective January 1, 2026) · (1), (4) (verified 2026) Official source
Colo. Rev. Stat. § 38-12-102.5 (maximum security deposit, as amended effective August 12, 2026) · (1), (2) (verified 2026) Official source
Colo. Rev. Stat. § 38-12-101 (legislative declaration for part 1) (verified 2026) Official source
Colo. Rev. Stat. § 38-12-207 (Mobile Home Park Act; lot deposits held in trust, earnings to the landlord) · (1), (3) (verified 2026) Official source

How this record was verified: Direct read of the Colorado Revised Statutes 2026, title 38, as published by the Office of Legislative Legal Services: §§ 38-12-101 through 38-12-104 read in full — the legislative declaration, all seven subsections of the definitions, the maximum-amount section, the return provision as rewritten by House Bill 25-1249 with all twelve subsections, and the hazardous-condition return rule — together with § 38-12-207 of the Mobile Home Park Act. Every occurrence of the word 'interest' in part 1 examined in context, and every occurrence of the phrase 'security deposit' anywhere in the 1,470-page title checked for interest, escrow, commingling, separate-account and trust-account terms in its neighbourhood. The General Assembly's bill record searched across the 2025 and 2026 sessions: seventy-one security-deposit measures enumerated, and the three landlord-tenant deposit bills among them — House Bill 25-1249, Senate Bill 26-054, and House Bill 25-1108 — read for interest content.