Section 1 — Overview: Can an HOA restrict short-term rentals in Colorado?

A Colorado association's authority to restrict short-term rentals comes from the recorded declaration, backstopped by the Colorado Common Interest Ownership Act (CCIOA), C.R.S. § 38-33.3-101 et seq., the unified statute governing condominiums and planned communities created on or after July 1, 1992.¹ The live questions aren't whether associations may regulate rentals at all, but two narrower ones: whether an existing residential-use covenant already prohibits STRs, and how any restriction gets enforced under the state's fining and collections regime.

On the first question, Colorado has a clear appellate answer that cuts against associations. In Houston v. Wilson Mesa Ranch Homeowners Association, Inc., the Colorado Court of Appeals held that short-term vacation rentals count as a residential use, not a commercial one, so a covenant limiting property to residential use and barring commercial use doesn't by itself prohibit STRs — the restriction has to be written into the declaration.¹¹ Unlike California and Arizona, Colorado doesn't appear to limit HOA rental authority by statute, so the declaration and its amendments control.¹

Enforcement is where Colorado has become distinctive. House Bill 22-1137 (2022) and later amendments govern how an association fines and collects for any covenant violation, including an STR violation, with notice, cure periods, a fine cap, and limits on foreclosure.⁸ Separately, resort-town and city STR ordinances regulate the owner-to-government relationship and don't expand or shrink association authority.² The sections below lay out the framework, the operational mechanics, and recent legislative and judicial activity.

Section 2 — The legal framework for HOA short-term rental restrictions

2A. The CCIOA framework and the source of rental authority

CCIOA, C.R.S. § 38-33.3-101 et seq., is a single unified statute based on the 1982 Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act. It governs both condominiums and planned communities, and Colorado doesn't maintain separate operative condominium and planned-community statutes for communities created on or after July 1, 1992, the date from which CCIOA applies in full.¹ For rentals, the recorded declaration is the primary source of authority; CCIOA operates as the amendment and enforcement backstop.

Pre-1992 communities aren't entirely outside CCIOA. C.R.S. § 38-33.3-117 lists specific sections that reach all common interest communities regardless of creation date, and later amendments have extended additional provisions to pre-1992 communities for events occurring after set dates.¹² The practical result is a layered applicability: post-1992 communities fall fully subject to CCIOA, while pre-1992 communities answer to enumerated sections, including many governance and enforcement provisions. Which provisions apply therefore turns on a community's creation date.

CCIOA also distinguishes between an association's authority over leasing generally and its authority over short-term or transient rentals specifically. A declaration may address long-term leasing, short-term rentals, or both, and whether STRs are restricted turns on the precise covenant language rather than on a general leasing clause. Because use restrictions must live in the recorded declaration, a rule or policy alone cannot create a new rental restriction.¹

2B. Restricting short-term rentals: the residential-use covenant question and explicit restrictions

The defining Colorado issue is whether a covenant limiting property to residential use already prohibits STRs. Colorado has answered this at the appellate level. In Houston v. Wilson Mesa Ranch Homeowners Association, Inc., 2015 COA 113, 360 P.3d 255, the Court of Appeals held that short-term vacation rentals don't violate a covenant prohibiting commercial or business use, reasoning that temporary or short-term occupancy remains a residential use, and that ambiguity in a covenant must be resolved in favor of the free and unrestricted use of property.¹¹

The court further held that the board couldn't accomplish a rental ban through its administrative procedures, because it can't enforce a covenant provision that doesn't exist. Houston remains the controlling Colorado authority and hasn't been overruled; no newer published Colorado appellate opinion addresses the residential-use covenant question.¹¹ What remains unsettled is what specific covenant wording will suffice and how a given declaration's transient-use or minimum-stay language gets construed.

To restrict STRs reliably, an association adopts an explicit restriction by amending the declaration. Because a rental restriction changes the uses to which a unit is restricted, C.R.S. § 38-33.3-217(4.5) requires approval by at least 67% of all unit owners, or a larger percentage if the declaration specifies one.³ For amendments generally, C.R.S. § 38-33.3-217(1)(a) requires more than 50% and caps the required percentage at 67%; any declaration provision purporting to require more than 67% for a general amendment is void and treated as 67%.⁴

Whether such an amendment binds an owner who purchased before it was adopted stands as the highest-stakes operational question, and it remains unsettled in Colorado. No controlling Colorado appellate decision squarely holds that a validly adopted rental-restriction amendment cannot reach pre-amendment owners. CCIOA does contain a one-year limitation on enforcing certain building restrictions in C.R.S. § 38-33.3-123(2), but that provision runs narrow and doesn't resolve rental grandfathering.⁵

Given the uncertainty, the question is contestable, and an amendment framed conservatively — with clear effective-date and applicability language — is the one least exposed.

Finally, Colorado doesn't limit HOA rental authority by statute the way some states do. It has no analog to California Civil Code § 4741 or Arizona Revised Statutes § 33-1806.01, both of which directly constrain association authority over rentals. In Colorado, the declaration and CCIOA's amendment provisions set the authority.¹

2C. Enforcement under HB 22-1137 and the local layer

House Bill 22-1137 (2022) reshaped how Colorado associations enforce covenants and impose fines, and its mechanics now govern enforcement of any STR restriction. For a violation that doesn't threaten public health or safety, the association must give the owner two consecutive 30-day periods to cure before taking legal action, may not impose daily fines, and may not foreclose for fine-based debt; a violation the association reasonably determines threatens public safety or health carries a 72-hour cure period.⁸

Under C.R.S. § 38-33.3-209.5, the total fines for a violation may not exceed $500, and that cap cannot be overridden by the governing documents.⁹ Later bills tightened the regime further: HB 24-1233 changed delinquency-notice methods, HB 24-1337 capped recoverable attorney fees at $5,000 or 50% of the original money owed and added foreclosure prerequisites, and HB 25-1043 raised the enforcement standard to strict compliance effective October 1, 2025.^13,14,15

The local layer sits alongside, not inside, association authority. Mountain-resort jurisdictions such as Vail, Aspen, Breckenridge, and Summit County, along with major cities including Denver and Boulder, impose STR licensing, caps, zoning, and occupancy rules.^2,16,17,18 These regimes regulate the owner-to-government relationship. Two recent local changes show how binding they can be: Colorado Springs Ordinance 25-45, effective June 30, 2025, bars a property with an accessory dwelling unit from holding a short-term rental permit, with a use-based grandfather for properties that held both before that date;¹⁹ and Summit County's Type II basin caps now bind, with the Snake River basin (130 cap, 137 issued) and Ten Mile basin (20 cap, 24 issued) over cap as of January 2026, so no new Type II license is available there.²⁰

Tax is a separate owner-facing layer: state sales tax applies to short-term stays, local lodging and marketing taxes apply on top, and the property-tax classification of STRs has drawn dispute. The Court of Appeals held in O'Neil v. Conejos County Board of Commissioners that a second home used for STRs remains residential for property-tax purposes, and legislative attempts to reclassify STRs as lodging (HB 24-1299 and SB 24-033) failed.^21,22,23

Because these layers are distinct, an owner who holds a valid local STR license may still violate the declaration, and an owner who complies with the declaration may still lack the local license required to operate.

Section 3 — Operational mechanics and enforcement

A. Adopting a valid restriction (the tools)

Given Houston, the most reliable mechanism is an explicit minimum-lease-term or transient-rental restriction written into the declaration, not reliance on a general residential-use covenant.¹¹ A board may adopt a rule that merely clarifies an existing declaration restriction — defining a term already used in the declaration, for instance — but any new use restriction, including a rental cap expressed as a percentage of units, must be in the declaration itself and, if added by amendment, requires the 67% approval under C.R.S. § 38-33.3-217(4.5).³

This statutory rule cannot be varied downward by the governing documents for use-changing amendments, though the declaration may set a higher threshold. Associations may separately impose internal administrative requirements consistent with the declaration, such as owner-information, registration, and lease-filing obligations, so long as they don't operate as an unrecorded use restriction.¹

B. Enforcement under HB 22-1137

Before fining for an STR violation, an association must adopt and follow a written enforcement policy, give notice identifying the violation and the cure steps, and provide an impartial hearing.⁹ For a non-health-and-safety violation, the owner gets two consecutive 30-day cure periods before the association may take legal action, and daily fines are prohibited; total fines for a violation are capped at $500.^8,9

Attorney fees recoverable in collection are capped at $5,000 or 50% of the original money owed under HB 24-1337, and fines alone cannot support foreclosure; foreclosure is available only for assessment debt and only after the statutory prerequisites are met.¹⁴ Beyond fines, the association's practical remedy for an ongoing STR violation is injunctive relief in District Court, since an association cannot evict a short-term tenant without a court order.

These statutory caps and periods cannot be shortened or waived by the governing documents. Association enforcement runs in parallel with local STR enforcement, and the two don't substitute for each other.

Section 4 — Recent legislative and judicial activity

4A. Recent bills

4B. Recent appellate rulings

No published Colorado appellate opinion in the past 36 months addresses rental-restriction covenants or use-changing declaration amendments; the controlling STR covenant authority remains Houston v. Wilson Mesa Ranch (2015).¹¹ The one published STR decision in that period is municipal: Dorotik v. Town of Breckenridge, 2026 COA 20 (Mar. 26, 2026), held as a matter of first impression that a government may impose a regulatory fee on short-term rental licensees, and fund services with it, even where the activity also generates general tax revenue, so Breckenridge's "revenue positive" charge for local workforce housing programs was not a tax requiring a TABOR vote; the decision says nothing about an association's authority to restrict STRs under its declaration.²⁴ The closest recent CCIOA decision on association authority follows.

4C. Active legislative or local debates

Statewide efforts to reclassify STRs as lodging for property tax failed in 2024 (HB 24-1299 and SB 24-033), and the classification debate continues alongside 2025 changes allowing counties to raise lodging taxes with voter approval.^22,23 Resort jurisdictions keep adjusting caps and permit rules, with Breckenridge and Summit County operating zone-based caps and waitlists.^17,18

Section 5 — National positioning and related coverage

Colorado runs primarily declaration-driven on rentals, which sets it apart from states like California and Arizona whose statutes directly limit HOA rental authority. What makes Colorado one of the most active states on this topic isn't a rental statute but the combination of a contested residential-use covenant question resolved by Houston, a detailed and increasingly strict statutory enforcement regime built on HB 22-1137 and its successors, and some of the heaviest local resort-town STR regulation in the country.

Those local ordinances restrain government, not associations; an association's rental authority is set by its declaration and CCIOA, and a local license neither creates nor defeats a covenant. For a multi-state operator entering Colorado, the practical implication runs threefold: authority to restrict rentals lives in the declaration, the residential-use covenant question is settled against implied STR bans, and enforcement must satisfy strict HB 22-1137 mechanics.

HOA Weekly's Colorado Short-Term Rentals coverage is revised when we verify a change from the General Assembly, the Colorado Court of Appeals and Supreme Court, and local governments. Federal frameworks — including the FHA, ADA, FDCPA, SCRA, and OTARD — also apply to Colorado associations regardless of the state framework.