Last verified
How this site is researched
Every legal claim on this site was checked against the primary source during the build, not recalled and not paraphrased from another website. Statutes are quoted verbatim from the official Colorado Revised Statutes with their effective dates; records come from the Colorado Division of Water Resources, dated on the day they were pulled.
Where we could not verify something, we say so on the page rather than filling the gap with plausible-sounding prose.
What counts as a source here
| Tier | What it is | How it is used |
|---|---|---|
| Primary law | Colorado Constitution, Colorado Revised Statutes, water court decrees, reported decisions | Quoted verbatim, cited, dated |
| Primary records | DWR / CDSS HydroBase — decreed rights, well permits, administrative calls | Pulled live, quoted with the date of the pull |
| Agency guidance | DWR and CWCB published guidance, forms, tool documentation | Cited for what the agency says and does |
| Everything else | Law firm articles, news, forums, other water sites | Not used as authority. At most, a pointer to a primary source we then read ourselves |
The statutory text we work from
Statutes on this site are quoted from the Colorado Revised Statutes 2025, published by the Office of Legislative Legal Services — the official text C.R.S. 2025 · Title 37. The Colorado Constitution comes from the same publication Colorado Constitution, and the common interest community provisions come from C.R.S. 2025 · Title 38.
Non-official mirrors with cleaner per-section URLs exist. We do not cite them, because a mirror is not the law.
The records we work from
Colorado publishes its water records through the CDSS/HydroBase system, with a public REST API that needs no key DWR REST API. When a page here gives a number — 173,056 decreed records, 157 active calls, an 1875 appropriation date on a particular ditch — that figure was pulled from the API or the tool on the date the page states, and the page carries a link back to the record.
We do not run live API calls from this site. Every figure is static, dated, and re-verified when a page is updated. The site is the manual for the state's tools, not a mirror of them — where you need current data, we send you to the source.
Dates on every page
Each page shows the date its claims were last verified against primary sources. That is not a publication date and not an automatic timestamp: it is the date a human checked the statutes and records the page relies on. If a page says July 2026, the statutes were read in July 2026.
What we deliberately do not publish
The discipline that matters most is knowing when to leave a gap. Current examples:
- No price per acre-foot. Colorado water has no screen price, and no official source publishes current statewide comparables. What rights are worth teaches the valuation drivers and sends you to an appraiser or a basin broker instead of printing a number that would be wrong somewhere and stale everywhere.
- No list of attorneys. We have not vetted any, and a directory scraped from search results would be advertising dressed as advice. The attorney page points at neutral official sources and says how we would disclose it if that ever changed.
- No snowpack, reservoir or drought figures. They change weekly. The supply picture covers structural pressures and links to the agencies for the moving numbers.
- No claim about who owns the most water. State records are organized by structure and decree, not beneficial owner, so an honest ranking is not available — and we say so.
Where we are careful about nuance
Two examples of places where the widely repeated version is not quite right, and this site says so:
- The famous ten-year rule for abandonment is real statutory language, but it sits in a section limited by its own terms to the 1978 tabulation. The abandonment page quotes both that provision and the standing decennial duty, rather than presenting the first as the general modern rule.
- The rain barrel rule is not the only rainwater law. Collecting rainwater also covers the 2009 provision that lets homes with an exempt well collect rooftop precipitation with no volume cap — which most guides omit entirely.
How to check our work
- Every page lists its primary sources at the foot, with links.
- Every statutory quote carries its section number and effective date, so you can find it in the official text.
- Every data figure carries the date it was pulled and a link to the DWR record or tool.
- If you find an error, tell us — corrections are made on the page, and the verified date is updated when they are.
What this site is not
It is reference information about Colorado water law, not legal advice. Water rights turn on facts, decrees and dates specific to a property, and the gap between "how this generally works" and "what happens with your right" is exactly where a water attorney earns their fee. See the full disclaimer.