Colorado Minimum Wage: State and Local Rates

A restaurant owner once asked me why her bookkeeper had flagged two different hourly floors for the same job title. One dishwasher worked at the original location, the other at a second site a mile east, across a city line she had never thought about. Same company, same role, two legal minimums three dollars apart.

That is the shape of the minimum wage problem in Colorado. The state rate moves every January 1 under a formula written into the constitution, and four local governments run their own higher rates on their own schedules. All four sit in the Denver and Boulder area, so an employer with two locations can straddle two different floors without ever leaving the Front Range.

This page covers one thing: what an hour of work has to be paid for in Colorado, at the state level and in each place that sets a higher floor. Overtime, leave, termination, and the rest of the picture live in the Colorado HR compliance guide.

The Current Colorado Rate

The Colorado minimum wage is $15.16 per hour, effective January 1, 2026. It applies at every employer in the state regardless of headcount or revenue, and it covers hourly, salaried, piece rate, commission, and task based pay alike. There is no small business exemption and no separate rate for part time staff.

The figure sits in Article XVIII, Section 15 of the Colorado Constitution. Each year the Division of Labor Standards and Statistics republishes it, along with every other dollar threshold in state wage law, in the 2026 PAY CALC Order, 7 CCR 1103-14. The Division also keeps a running state and local rate table on its Labor Standards and Statistics page.

Minimum wage covers all time worked, and the COMPS Order reads that phrase broadly. Setup and cleanup, clocking in and out, required training, and mandatory meetings are all compensable. So are the paid 10 minute rest periods, which count as time worked for minimum wage purposes and catch out employers paying piece rate or commission.

The ladder above comes from the Division’s own history of Colorado rates. Two things are worth internalizing from it. The increase never gets skipped, and the gap between the full rate and the tipped cash wage is always exactly $3.02, because that number is fixed in the constitution rather than adjusted with inflation.

When the Rate Changes Next

The next increase takes effect January 1, 2027, and the amount is already public: $15.71 per hour, with $12.69 as the tipped cash wage. The Division announced the figure on August 13, 2026, calling it a 3.6 percent increase over the current rate.

Colorado adjusts the minimum wage for inflation every year under the state constitution. The Division uses the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers for the Denver area, measured from July 1 through June 30, so the calculation finishes in late summer and the number is locked into the rules during the fall rulemaking. Deflation cannot pull the rate down.

Denver runs the same annual calendar with a different index. The city uses the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, which tracks a narrower slice of households, and it has already published $19.84 for 2027. The other three local governments set their own adjustment methods, covered in the local rates section below.

Practically, this gives you a four month planning window. The 2027 figure went public in mid August and applies to the first pay period that includes January 1. If you build budgets in the fall, you are working from a published rate rather than a forecast, which is a better position than employers in states where the number lands in December.

Tipped Employees and the Tip Credit

Colorado allows a tip credit of up to $3.02 per hour. In 2026 that puts the lowest legal cash wage for a tipped employee at $12.14, and tips have to carry total pay to at least $15.16 for every hour worked. When tips fall short in a pay period, the employer pays the shortfall in direct wages.

Not everyone who occasionally receives a tip qualifies. The COMPS Order defines a tipped employee as someone who regularly receives more than $1.64 per hour in tips, averaged over the pay period. A busser who clears that bar qualifies. A line cook who does not clear it has to be paid the full cash minimum.

The credit is conditional on leaving the tips alone. If any part of an employee’s tips is diverted to untipped staff or to the business itself, through a required pool or otherwise, the credit disappears and the full minimum wage is owed in cash. Service charges are a separate category and are not tips. Our guide to minimum wage for tipped employees walks through how the federal version of this arithmetic differs.

One local variation matters. Every Colorado tip credit is $3.02 except in Edgewater, which raised its offset to $4.67 per hour for 2026 under city Ordinance 2025-23, using authority granted by House Bill 25-1208. A larger local offset can never push the direct cash wage below the state tipped minimum of $12.14.

City and County Rates

Four Colorado jurisdictions require more than the state rate: the City and County of Denver, the City of Edgewater, the City of Boulder, and the unincorporated areas of Boulder County. Everywhere else, the state figure governs. The Division tracks all four in INFO #19 on local minimum wages.

What pulls an employee into a local rate is where the work physically happens, not where the business is registered or where payroll is processed. The rate reaches anyone who works, or is expected to work, at least four hours in a week inside the jurisdiction. Driving straight through on the way to a job elsewhere does not count, and neither do stops for fuel, meals, or personal errands, but a work stop does.

Boulder County is the one that catches people. Its rate applies only in unincorporated areas, so it reaches Niwot, Gunbarrel outside the city limits, Eldorado Springs, Allenspark, Hygiene, and Coal Creek Canyon, but not the ten incorporated municipalities inside the county. Those are the cities of Boulder, Lafayette, Longmont, and Louisville, and the towns of Erie, Jamestown, Lyons, Nederland, Superior, and Ward. The City of Boulder sets its own rate, which happens to match the county figure for 2026 and then diverges in 2027.

State law puts two limits on all of this. A local government cannot raise its rate by more than 15 percent of the prior year’s minimum wage in a single step, and a new local rate has to take effect on January 1, the same day the state adjustment lands. That is why none of these figures ever move mid year.

Industry Rules and Exemptions

Colorado sets one statewide minimum wage and no industry specific rate. There is no fast food minimum, no healthcare minimum, and no hospitality minimum, which makes Colorado simpler to run than California on this point. Our overview of the fast food minimum wage covers the states that do split rates by sector.

Agriculture is covered rather than carved out. The COMPS Order states that all minimum wage laws and rules apply to all employees of all agricultural employers, with a single exception for range workers. That is stricter than federal law, which exempts several categories of farm labor from the minimum wage entirely.

What the state does have is a short list of jobs paid a weekly minimum instead of the hourly one. These are genuine carve outs, and none of them is a general purpose exemption a normal small business can reach for.

The ski industry shows up in the COMPS Order as well, and it is regularly misread. Employees performing duties directly related to ski area operations are exempt from certain overtime rules, not from the minimum wage. Every ski employee is still owed at least the applicable state or local minimum for all time worked.

Youth and Training Wages

Colorado permits a rate 15 percent below the state minimum for a minor who is not emancipated, which comes to $12.89 per hour in 2026. An emancipated minor is owed the full $15.16. The rule sits in C.R.S. section 8-6-108.5 and in Rule 11 of the Youth Employment Standards Rules, 7 CCR 1103-20.

Two conditions make this narrower than it looks. The employer may pay the reduced rate only after a diligent inquiry into whether the minor is emancipated, and must keep records of that inquiry and the conclusion. Separately, a minor employed in violation of Colorado youth employment law is owed the full minimum wage no matter what the inquiry found.

The reduction also stops at the city line. It does not apply in any jurisdiction with a local minimum wage, with one exception the Division recognizes: Denver allows it for minors enrolled in city certified youth employment programs. In Edgewater, Boulder, and unincorporated Boulder County, a minor is paid the full local rate.

Note the first row. Colorado has no training wage, no learner wage, and no 90 day starter rate for adults, so a new hire over 17 starts at the full applicable minimum on day one. Hiring a minor also brings duties well past the hourly rate, including limits on hours and prohibited work, and the Colorado hiring guide covers that paperwork.

Posting and Notice Requirements

Every employer subject to the COMPS Order must display the current year COMPS Order poster in an area frequented by employees, where it can be easily read during the shift. The Division releases a new version each December, and the poster page carries it in more than a dozen languages.

Colorado goes further than most states here, because the poster is also a distribution obligation. If you publish a handbook, a manual, or written policies of any kind, the COMPS Order or its poster has to go out with them, and if employees sign the handbook they sign a separate acknowledgment of receiving it.

The penalty for getting this wrong is unusual and expensive. An employer that fails the posting or distribution requirement becomes ineligible for any employee specific credit, deduction, or exemption in the COMPS Order. In a restaurant, that means the $3.02 tip credit vanishes and the full cash minimum is owed for every tipped hour worked.

Colorado and the Federal Floor

The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 per hour since 2009. Colorado’s rate is more than double it, so the federal figure never governs a Colorado paycheck. Where more than one wage requirement covers the same employee, the one setting the higher standard applies, a principle written into the COMPS Order and reflected in the US Department of Labor state minimum wage tables.

Federal rules still matter for everything Colorado law does not displace, including recordkeeping and the classification tests that decide who is owed a minimum wage in the first place. Our federal minimum wage guide covers those, and the increase tracker shows where Colorado sits against the rest of the country.

One connection between the two systems is worth flagging. The Colorado salary threshold for the executive, administrative, and professional exemption is $1,111.23 per week for 2026, a rounded $57,784 a year, published in the same PAY CALC Order as the minimum wage. It is far above the federal threshold, so a salaried manager can be exempt under federal law and non exempt under Colorado law.

What to Do When a Rate Rises

A minimum wage increase is a payroll project rather than a single field update, and in Colorado it arrives every January 1 without fail. Work through the same sequence each time, and start it in the fall while the numbers are public but the deadline is not yet close.

The step most employers skip is the second one. If your budgeting works from a fully loaded hourly figure rather than the base rate, the increase is far easier to model, and our breakdown of how to calculate labor cost shows the arithmetic.

Keeping the rate right is the easy half. Keeping the paperwork that proves it right, meaning offer letters, wage notices, poster acknowledgments, and handbook receipts, is where small teams lose hours every January. FirstHR keeps that documentation attached to the employee record, so an updated rate flows into onboarding materials instead of sitting in a folder nobody opens until an audit.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the minimum wage in Colorado right now?

It is $15.16 per hour, effective January 1, 2026, at every employer in the state. There is no small business exemption and no separate figure for part time or seasonal staff, and the rate covers hourly, salaried, piece rate, and commission pay alike. Four local governments require more, and where a local rate reaches the work, that is the rate you pay.

Can I count tips toward the minimum wage in Colorado?

Yes, up to $3.02 per hour, which puts the tipped cash wage at $12.14 in 2026. Tips must carry total pay to at least $15.16, and the employer makes up any shortfall in direct wages. Only employees who regularly receive more than $1.64 per hour in tips qualify, and diverting any part of those tips to untipped staff or to the business forfeits the credit.

Which Colorado cities and counties have their own minimum wage?

Denver, Edgewater, the City of Boulder, and the unincorporated areas of Boulder County. Denver is highest at $19.29 for 2026, then Edgewater at $18.17, then Boulder and unincorporated Boulder County at $16.82. A local rate covers anyone who works at least four hours a week inside the jurisdiction, based on where the work physically happens.

What do I pay a 16 year old in Colorado?

A minor who is not emancipated may be paid $12.89 per hour, which is 15 percent below the state rate. An emancipated minor gets the full $15.16. The employer must document a diligent inquiry into emancipation status, and the reduction does not apply in Edgewater, Boulder, or unincorporated Boulder County. Denver permits it only for city certified youth employment programs.

Does Colorado have a fast food or healthcare minimum wage?

No. Colorado sets a single statewide rate with no industry specific minimum. Agriculture is fully covered rather than exempt, apart from range workers on a weekly minimum of $620.52. Certain drivers and seasonal camp staff also have weekly figures. The ski industry exemption in the COMPS Order applies to overtime rules, not to the minimum wage.

Do I have to post the minimum wage in Colorado?

Yes. Display the current year COMPS Order poster where employees can easily read it, and replace it when the Division publishes a new version each December. You must also include the poster with any handbook or written policies and collect a signed acknowledgment if employees sign the handbook. Failing these requirements costs you the tip credit and other employee specific credits.

When does Colorado’s minimum wage go up again?

On January 1, 2027, to $15.71 per hour, with a tipped cash wage of $12.69. The Division announced the figure on August 13, 2026, a 3.6 percent increase. Colorado adjusts for inflation annually using the Denver area consumer price index measured from July through June, so the number is always public by late summer.