Coloradans will get a TABOR refund for 2024: New audit

DENVER (KDVR) — The Colorado Office of the State Auditor said Monday that the state collected $1.4 billion in extra revenue during the 2024 fiscal year, which means that Coloradans will get a TABOR refund when filing their taxes in early 2025.

This is because the excess tax revenue for 2024 is big enough to trigger all three of the existing TABOR excess revenue mechanisms.

Taxpayers will not receive nearly as much as they did in 2022 and 2023, because there is less excess revenue.

For comparison, there was $3.28 billion in excess funds in 2023, and all taxpayers received either $800 or $1,600, depending on if they filed single or jointly.

However, in 2024, that excess is projected to be $1.4 billion, which is less than half the excess in 2023.

Additionally, because lawmakers have not passed a bill to distribute the refunds evenly to all taxpayers as they did in 2022 and 2023, the amount each person gets back will vary by income.

While the audit report did not include an estimate of what taxpayers may expect, a previous report by the Colorado Legislative Council estimated that single filers could get anywhere from $181 to $571, depending on income.

TABOR checks overall are expected to drop significantly in the coming years, according to the same Colorado Legislative Council report.

This includes things like a softening economy, as well as several bills that were passed in 2024 that changed the way excess revenue will be distributed going forward.

These bills add a few extra filters that the excess money must go through before the six-tiered sales tax refund – what most people know of as the TABOR refund – is triggered.

One of these new filters will decrease the state income tax based on excess revenue. Through this, any excess funds between $300 million and $1.5 billion will trigger a tax decrease of between 0.04% and 0.15%.

Anything above $1.5 billion will then trigger a temporary reduction in sales and use taxes. After the money filters through that, anything left over will be distributed via the sales tax refund.

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