CO · state guide

Colorado background screening law

How the courts here are organized

Colorado has 23 judicial districts and 64 counties, and the state’s own docket search is built around them rather than around a name. The judiciary’s docket search page states that at least one filter in addition to a date is required to perform a search, and the filters it offers are Judicial District, running from the first to the twenty-third, County, Courtroom, and a Both, County or District selector. There is no statewide name search that returns a person’s cases across the state, so a Colorado search is assembled district by district in the way a county-by-county state is assembled county by county.

The judiciary does not offer a court-record channel of its own either. Its access guidance states that access to court records is not available directly through the Colorado Judicial Branch website, and the commercial product it points to carries the disclaimer that the information on that website does not represent all the cases or case types filed with the Colorado courts. Both statements are worth carrying, because together they mean a Colorado court search is a search of a source that does not claim to be complete.

The county filter has its own shape worth knowing. The County dropdown enumerates 63 entries ending in County, plus three Denver entries for District, Juvenile and Probate. Denver is the City and County of Denver, and it is split three ways in the court organization rather than appearing as one county.

The repository side of Colorado is a split, and the split is the interesting part. The Colorado Crime Information Center is the restricted law-enforcement system, and access to it rests on federal criminal justice information rules rather than on state screening law. The public product is the Internet Criminal History Check, a name-based criminal history search that the Criminal Information Bureau describes as obtainable instantaneously from a computing device.

The Bureau is explicit that the two audiences do not see the same record. Its own page states that all Colorado criminal history record information is accessible to the public with three exceptions, and then states separately that law enforcement agencies are able to view the complete record including those exceptions. The exceptions are juvenile arrests for persons 17 and younger except where adjudicated as an adult, traffic arrests under the age of 16, and arrests sealed by court order.

Two details follow. The Bureau states that it never removes or deletes criminal records from its database and retains them per state law, so the repository does not age records out and the functional limit on what may be reported from Colorado is sealing rather than a reporting clock. And the Bureau notes that only currently registered sex offenders are noted on the criminal history record.

The fees are published, and the two products are not interchangeable. The name-based Internet Criminal History Check is $6.00, it is generated by the requester, and the Bureau states that an Internet Criminal History Check cannot be notarized. A criminal history record information request processed by the Biometric Identification and Records Unit is $13.00 and is notarized on request. An employer or provider that needs a certified document is buying the second product, not the first.

The consequence of the split is that a Colorado report is only as complete as the product it came from, and the Bureau has published the fact that the public product is the narrower one. A provider using the public product is delivering a record the state’s own agency describes as missing three categories that law enforcement can see. That is not a defect in the public product, which is doing what it is defined to do. It is a reason to say which product a Colorado record came from.

The second consequence is that the public product is a name-based search. A name-based product has no fingerprint anchor, and the Bureau’s own framing of it as instantaneous and obtainable from any computing device makes the trade-off visible: speed and open access are purchased with the identification certainty that a fingerprint submission would give. Colorado does sell a fingerprint-based public product as well, under C.R.S. 24-72-304, and the fee schedule places it above the name-based products.

The court side has the same shape for a different reason. Because the docket search cannot be run on a name alone, a Colorado court sweep is an iteration over 23 districts or 64 counties, and the disclaimer on the product the judiciary points to means even a complete iteration is a search of a source that does not warrant completeness. The honest coverage statement for Colorado names the districts searched and stops there.

Two caveats on this section should be stated. The Bureau pages describe the access rules, the exclusions and the fees, and the statutory sections behind them were not read, because the Colorado Revised Statutes has no reachable host from this environment. The account here is from official agency pages and not from the code. And the sealed-arrest exclusion in the public product is only a category; the sealing regime that produces it is at C.R.S. 13-3-117 and 24-72-704 and is set out in the dimensions below.

One jurisdiction point completes the structure. Denver’s three entries in the county filter reflect a consolidated city and county whose court organization does not map onto the pattern of the other 63, so a Colorado coverage map that treats Denver as one county will be wrong.

The federal baseline

Federal law sets the floor here as it does everywhere. It is at 15 U.S.C. §1681 et seq., it binds the agency and the employer separately, and it does not vary by state. The FCRA article covers it section by section, including the seven-year limits, the salary threshold and the adverse action sequence, so that this page does not restate any of it.

What follows is only the overlay: what Colorado adds on top of that floor, and where it departs from it.

What Colorado law adds

Reporting limits at a glance

Every figure below is against Colorado law. Where a row says “federal only”, the state has set nothing and 15 U.S.C. §1681c governs.

Adverse action here

The federal sequence applies: pre-adverse action notice with the report and the summary of rights, a reasonable opportunity to respond, then the adverse action notice with the agency’s details and a dispute route. The FCRA article sets it out in full.

Colorado adds a step ahead of the sequence for employers, and it is a step most processes do not have. C.R.S. 8-2-130(3)(a) bars inquiring into criminal history on an initial written or electronic application form, so the application itself is the point of compliance rather than any later stage. Subsection (3)(b) then makes clear that obtaining the publicly available criminal background report at any time is permitted, which means the Act shapes when the question is asked and not when the search is run. An employer whose process asks the question on the form and runs the search later has the order the wrong way round.

Colorado also changes the arithmetic of a report before any adverse action is considered. If the only item standing between an applicant and a job is a sealed record, an expunged record, or an arrest that produced no conviction, C.R.S. 5-18-109(1)(e.5) says it does not belong in the report at all, and C.R.S. 5-18-105 says the provider must exclude it unless the user demonstrates a legal obligation to consider it. A provider that surfaces a Colorado non-conviction and then relies on the adverse action process to be fair has the sequencing wrong, because the bar is on the report rather than on the decision.

The same is true of age. Because subsection (2) no longer excepts employment at any salary, an item older than seven years sits under the (1)(g) cap regardless of what the role pays, and the federal $75,000 exemption does not rescue it in Colorado. A process that scopes its lookback by the compensation of the role, which is a reasonable thing to do under federal law, is applying a rule Colorado no longer has.

The automated decision statute adds a disclosure duty on the employer side from 1 January 2027 rather than a notice in the adverse action sequence. Section 6-1-1704 places point-of-interaction notices and a public posting on the deployer, and section 6-1-1703 places record keeping there for not less than three years. Adverse-outcome disclosure is due within thirty days of the decision and must name the system, its version and its developer. The consumer rights at 6-1-1705 include a right to human review and reconsideration, and the definition of meaningful human review turns on whether the reviewer can actually alter the outcome, which is a stricter test than having a person look at the output.

For the provider rather than the employer, the operative Colorado fact is the product. A report drawn from the Internet Criminal History Check carries three categories of exclusion that the state’s own agency documents, and a report drawn from a criminal history record information request through the Biometric Identification and Records Unit is a different instrument at a different price with different certification. Because the Bureau states that law enforcement sees the complete record including those exclusions, the honest form of a Colorado coverage statement names which product produced the record.

Screening in Colorado: what your process needs

• Confirm the Colorado product is named on the report, since the public Internet Criminal History Check and the Biometric Identification and Records Unit record have different coverage and different certification.
• Confirm a notarized Colorado record is ordered through the Biometric Identification and Records Unit, since an Internet Criminal History Check cannot be notarized.
• Confirm sealed, expunged and non-conviction Colorado records are excluded by default rather than surfaced, since C.R.S. 5-18-109(1)(e.5) bars them from the report.
• Confirm any decision to include a sealed Colorado record rests on a written demonstration from the user of a legal obligation to consider it, which is the only thing that displaces the duty at C.R.S. 5-18-105.
• Confirm the Colorado lookback is not scoped by the salary of the role, since the employment salary exception was deleted in 2022 and the section has no employment figure left.
• Confirm the Colorado coverage map is built district by district across all 23 judicial districts, since there is no statewide name search.
• Confirm Denver is handled as three court entries rather than one county, matching the county filter.
• Confirm no Colorado coverage claim asserts completeness, since the judiciary offers no record channel of its own and the product it points to disclaims representing all cases or case types.
• Confirm a Colorado search does not depend on a name-only match against the open product where identification certainty matters, since the public name-based product has no fingerprint anchor.
• Confirm the application form for any Colorado position does not ask about criminal history, and that the question is asked at the stage the Act permits.
• Confirm any Colorado advertisement for a position does not state that a person with a criminal history may not apply.
• Confirm the automated decision duties are on the roadmap for 1 January 2027, including point-of-interaction notices, the public posting, thirty-day adverse-outcome disclosure and three-year record keeping.
• Confirm any Colorado automated screening tool can deliver meaningful human review as defined, meaning review by someone with the authority and competence to change the decision.
• Confirm sealing dates are applied by disposition type: four years for a civil infraction, seven for a petty offense or misdemeanor, ten for an eligible felony.
• Confirm no Colorado claim is made about an employer credit-check restriction. It is unverified and is not a negative.

Related states

• Montana. Montana caps criminal record reporting at seven years and the cap reaches convictions, with no salary exemption anywhere in the statute and no exceptions subsection at all, so an old conviction is not reportable here at any salary. It also names marijuana in its off-duty lawful-product protection, and it splits the state’s criminal record into a restricted stream and an unrestricted one in which the courts sit.
• Washington. Washington cut its salary threshold to $20,000, which reaches effectively every job in the state, and bars juvenile records outright for anyone 21 or older, while still allowing arrest records on the same clock as convictions.
• Minnesota. Minnesota requires a report to reach the consumer within 24 hours of going to the employer, and its ban-the-box law binds private employers with no size threshold.

What we do

Colorado is the state where a sealing bill quietly rewrote the consumer reporting rules. Its consumer credit reporting act bars sealed records, expunged records and records that did not result in a conviction from any consumer report, and it requires the provider to exclude sealed and expunged records unless the customer demonstrates a legal obligation to consider them. The salary exception that could have switched those rules off for senior roles was deleted in 2022, and the exceptions subsection was replaced in 2023 with a single mortgage-sized credit exception, so a Colorado employment report at any pay carries the non-conviction bar and a seven-year cap. Layered on that is the automated decision-making statute, which names employment among the domains it covers, triggers on technology used to materially influence a hiring decision rather than on the decision itself, and starts running on 1 January 2027 with thirty-day adverse-outcome notices and three-year record keeping. The court side closes the loop: 23 judicial districts, 64 counties, no statewide name search, and a judiciary that says access is not available through its own website while the product it points to disclaims representing all cases.

Sources

• C.R.S. §5-18-109, Reporting of information prohibited, exceptions, and repeal
• C.R.S. §5-18-105, Consumer reports, accuracy of information
• SB22-099, Ch. 276 (2022), concerning the procedure for sealing criminal records for nonviolent offenses
• HB23-1126, Ch. 374 (2023), amending C.R.S. §5-18-109
• C.R.S. §8-2-130, the Colorado Chance to Compete Act, as enacted by HB19-1025, Ch. 284 (2019)
• C.R.S. §8-5-201, Equal Pay for Equal Work Act pay transparency
• C.R.S. §24-34-402.5, discriminatory or unfair employment practices, off-duty conduct
• Coats v. Dish Network, LLC, 2015 CO 44
• Williams v. Rock-Tenn Services, Inc., 2016 COA 18
• C.R.S. §13-3-117, State court administrator, automatic conviction sealing
• C.R.S. §24-72-704, Sealing of arrest records when no charges filed, automatic sealing
• C.R.S. §24-72-304, fingerprint-based public criminal history
• C.R.S. §6-1-1701 to §6-1-1709, Automated Decision-Making Technology in Consequential Decisions, as reenacted by SB26-189, Ch. 131 (2026)
• SB 24-205 (2024), Ch. 198, the original enactment of part 17
• SB25B-004, 2025 Extraordinary Session, Ch. 3, Increase Transparency for Algorithmic Systems
• Colorado Bureau of Investigation, Internet Criminal History Check
• Colorado Bureau of Investigation, fees and forms information
• Colorado Judicial Branch, docket search
• Colorado Judicial Branch, court records access guidance

Last reviewed 23 September 2026. This page is checked on a quarterly cycle, because state screening law changes every legislative session. Nothing here is legal advice; see the terms of use.