Colorado is taxing homeowners insurers to pay for hail-resistant roofs — but not, clearly, HOA roofs
Colorado is taxing homeowners insurers to pay for hail-resistant roofs — but not, clearly, HOA roofs
2026-09-10 · Colorado · Legislation
Colorado has created a government-owned business inside its insurance regulator, funded by a levy on homeowners insurers, to pay for hail-resistant roofs — and nothing in the act says whether an association-owned roof qualifies. SB26-155 was signed by Governor Jared Polis on June 4, 2026 and took effect August 12, 2026, creating the Strengthen Colorado Homes Enterprise at C.R.S. 10-4-2001 through 10-4-2005.1
The state's reasoning is blunt and, on its own numbers, correct. Insurance Commissioner Michael Conway: “Hail is the number one cost driver of homeowners insurance premiums in our state, and this legislation will ensure that more Coloradans can afford to upgrade their roofs, thereby reducing claims and risk across the state.”2
The fee, and the line that says who pays it
Beginning January 1, 2027, an admitted insurer offering multiperil homeowner's insurance in Colorado pays an annual fee equal to one-half of one percent of the total premium it collected on those policies in the preceding calendar year. The FAIR Plan is excluded.
And C.R.S. 10-4-2003(4)(b) is worth quoting for owners who will assume otherwise: “each insurer shall pay the fee to the enterprise and shall not surcharge the fee amount to policyholders.”
What the grants buy, and what they will not
Under C.R.S. 10-4-2004 the enterprise makes grants to Colorado homeowners to retrofit residential property against hail and windstorm loss, and board rules must allocate at least eighty-five percent of fee revenue to those homeowner grants.
A grantee must, as applicable, have insurable Colorado residential property covered by a homeowner's policy, obtain permits, comply with building codes, arrange and pay for inspections, construct a roof meeting resilient roof system standards, and select a Colorado-licensed contractor that belongs to a professional roofing association and “attests that the contractor does not waive deductibles and agrees to repair, rather than replace, roofs when appropriate.” A contractor receiving grant money is prohibited from waiving deductibles. Grant money may not be used for general roof maintenance or repair, and nothing creates an entitlement to a grant.
“Resilient roof system” at C.R.S. 10-4-2002(6) means a roof carrying “a verified wind and hail certification from the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety ‘Fortified’ program or a similar science-based, verifiable certification, as determined by the board by rule.”
The open question, stated honestly
The grants run to “Colorado homeowners” for “residential property.” The act does not say whether an association is a homeowner, and neither the bill summary nor the Division's announcement addresses associations at all. That is the single most important follow-up for a Colorado condominium or attached-townhome board, and it is genuinely unresolved as of today. We are not going to guess at it, and neither should a board building a reserve plan around it.
What can be said is that the answer matters differently depending on who owns the roof.
Where the association does not own the roof
In single-family and many detached-product Colorado HOAs, the owner owns the roof. There, the practical consequence is not money — it is architectural review.
Expect a wave of applications from 2027 for FORTIFIED-standard roofs: impact-resistant and Class 4 products, sometimes with different profiles and different colours than the community's approved palette. A board that has never considered whether its design guidelines permit resilient roofing materials should decide that now, and publish an approved resilient-roof product list, before the grant money starts moving. An architectural rule that blocks a state-funded FORTIFIED roof is a live conflict waiting for a first case.
Where the association does own the roof
In condominium and attached communities the association owns and insures the roof, so it is not an obvious grant applicant. But the same resilient-roof standard is now the standard insurers will be reporting discounts against.
New C.R.S. 10-4-405(1.2) requires that, no sooner than January 1, 2027 and once the Commissioner adopts rules, a multiperil homeowner's insurer file annually an exhibit reporting policies in force, the number of homes that have installed a resilient roof system, the discount applied for having one, and wind and hail claims frequency and severity for homes with and without one.
That is a dataset that has not existed before. A board approaching a roof replacement should ask its master-policy carrier, in writing, what discount a FORTIFIED-certified roof earns, and put that figure into the reserve-funding decision rather than treating the certification as a cost with no return.
Why hail and not wildfire
The choice of peril is not political. The Division of Insurance requested data from twenty homeowners insurance carriers representing 80% of the market premium and calculated that hail accounts for 26% to 54% of an average Colorado homeowners premium, against 0.9% to 24.6% for wildfire. In Jefferson County the hail share was 55.9% against 6.1% for wildfire; in El Paso County 58.5% against 6.0%.
The savings math followed: the Division found hail mitigation has the potential to save consumers an average of $82 to $387 a year, while wildfire mitigation “only has the potential to save consumers an average of $3 to $25.” It also observed that insurers are “spreading the cost of hail risk across the state,” while pricing wildfire by targeting high-risk areas.
Read against the association-eligibility question, that is the frustration in a sentence: hail is the peril where mitigation actually returns money, Colorado association property insurance is dominated by hail-driven roof severity on large campus-style roof surfaces, and the roofs the association owns are the ones whose eligibility nobody has confirmed.
What to watch next, with dates
January 1, 2027: initial board appointments are due. The seven-member board is chaired by the Commissioner or a designee, with six gubernatorial appointees confirmed by the Senate to three-year terms — two insurer representatives, a county commissioner or county employee with home-hardening expertise, one member with home-hardening, roofing or resilient-roof-manufacturing expertise, one with technical homeowner's-insurance expertise, and one further appointee.
Board rule-making on what counts as a “similar science-based, verifiable certification” alongside IBHS FORTIFIED — and, one hopes, on whether an association-maintained roof is in or out.
The first 10-4-405(1.2) filings, which will produce the first public Colorado numbers on what a resilient roof is actually worth in premium.
The wildfire study under C.R.S. 10-4-2005, which the board must deliver to the House Transportation, Housing & Local Government and Senate Local Government & Housing committees, evaluating structure, attachment points and caps for a high-risk wildfire programme.
Related Colorado HOA Topics
- SB26-155 final act text, new C.R.S. 10-4-2001 through 10-4-2005 and 10-4-405(1.2) (source of the quoted language) ↩
- "Colorado Takes Further Action to Lower Homeowners Insurance Rates" (June 4, 2026), Colorado Division of Insurance — source of the Conway quotation ↩
- "Hail is the Number One Cost Driver of Insurance in Colorado" — Colorado Division of Insurance (premium shares and mitigation savings) ↩
- SB26-155 summary, Colorado Division of Real Estate, HOA Information and Resource Center ↩
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