The short answer
At today's Denver prices and rents, owning overtakes renting in year 13 — later than a typical owner stays, and by a margin so thin that we would not defend it to two significant figures.
Denver has been the narrowest result in our set through four revisions of the underlying data, and it has landed on both sides of the line. Read the number as "this is roughly a coin flip on our assumptions" rather than as a verdict. The assumption that decides it is at the bottom of this page.
| Input | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Typical home value | $592,483 | Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI), single-family homes only, smoothed & seasonally adjusted (Metro_zhvi_uc_sfr_tier_0.33_0.67_sm_sa_month.csv) (July 2026) |
| Typical single-family rent | $2,993 / month | Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI), single-family residences, smoothed (Metro_zori_uc_sfr_sm_month.csv) (July 2026) |
| Effective property-tax rate | 0.54% | Colorado assesses residential property at a statutory percentage of actual value, reappraised on a two-year cycle, with no acquisition reset and no homestead exclusion for non-seniors. For tax year 2025, payable 2026, that is 7.05% for school levies and 6.25% for local-government levies, with no value exclusion. Denver's 2025 levies are 52.274 mills for School District No. 1 and 27.328 mills for the City and County of Denver and its other citywide funds — 79.602 mills in all. So 0.0705 x 52.274 + 0.0625 x 27.328 = 0.5393% of price, or $3,195 a year on a $592,483 home, rounded to 0.54%. Tax year 2026 raises the local-government rate to 6.8% and subtracts 10% of the first $700,000 of value from the local-government base; on the same levies that lands at 0.5358% — still 0.54%. Why not the Census ratio: Colorado caps nothing and resets nothing on sale, so the ACS ratio is not describing a different taxpayer here, and at 0.50% it is the closest the Census shortcut comes to a derived rate anywhere in our set. It is still the wrong figure for this page: it averages 2019-2023 bills against an all-homes median value of $570,300, where the derivation above applies the current statutory assessment rates and Denver's published levies to the single-family price this page actually prices. Agreement within 0.04pp is a good sign about the method, not a reason to publish the shortcut. For the record, that ratio is 0.50% — $2,873 median taxes paid ÷ $570,300 median home value for CBSA 19740, per US Census Bureau, American Community Survey — tables B25103 (median real estate taxes paid) and B25077 (median home value), metro level (2023 5-year estimates).City and County of Denver Assessment Division, 2025 Abstract of Assessment and Summary of Levies; residential assessment rates and the tax-year-2026 value exclusion per the Colorado Division of Property Taxation (2025 levies, tax year 2025 assessment rates) |
| Homeowner's insurance | $3,040 / year | Denver County. The Colorado Division of Insurance's February 2026 data call to 20 carriers, representing 80% of the market, puts Denver County's average homeowners premium at $3,040, of which $1,547 is the hail component and $30 the wildfire one. Denver is the only county in the CBSA for which the DOI published a dollar figure. This is the CBSA's core county, not the metro: Adams, Arapahoe, Broomfield, Douglas and Jefferson are not in it, and the DOI does not state the policy period behind the figure. Carried forward from the NAIC's 2023 Colorado HO-3 average of $2,492 at the growth Texas recorded over the same years, the arithmetic lands at about $3,100 — close enough to publish the DOI number as it stands. This page previously published $4,824, a quoted premium from a rate-comparison sample at a fixed $300,000 of coverage. Quotes run above what insurers actually write, so we moved to the written figure.Colorado Division of Insurance / DORA, hail and wildfire premium data call — average homeowners premium by county, 20 carriers representing 80% of the market. Counties per US Census Bureau / OMB, Core Based Statistical Area delineation — central counties of each CBSA (July 2023); the quoted premium it replaced per Insurance.com (Quadrant Information Services) average annual homeowner's premium by ZIP code — $300,000 dwelling coverage, $300,000 liability, $1,000 deductible, 2% hurricane deductible in Florida; averaged over the CBSA's central counties and weighted by owner-occupied units (August 2026) (published February 2026) |
Why Denver lands here
Denver is the mirror image of the Texas metros on this site, and it is the most interesting comparison in the pilot.
Colorado has the second-lowest effective property-tax rate of the metros we cover: 0.54%, behind only Phoenix — and Phoenix's is low for a reason Colorado's is not, a capped assessed value that has fallen behind the market rather than a light rate on a full one. Denver's is not a rounding artefact either: it is roughly a third of what a comparable Florida bill looks like as a share of price. On a $592,483 Denver home it works out to about $3,199 a year. Apply Miami's 1.57% rate to that same Denver house and the bill would be close to $9,300. Colorado residential property is taxed lightly by national standards, and for a homeowner that is worth thousands of dollars a year.
That rate is derived from Colorado's own assessment rates and Denver's own levies, not from the Census. Colorado assesses residential property at a statutory share of actual value with no cap and no reset on sale, so — unlike Miami or the Texas metros — a buyer here is on the same footing as the neighbour who bought in 2009. For tax year 2025, payable 2026, that share is 7.05% for school levies and 6.25% for local-government levies, applied to Denver's 52.274 school mills and 27.328 city mills. The arithmetic is 0.0705 × 52.274 + 0.0625 × 27.328 = 0.5393%, or $3,199 a year on this page's price. Tax year 2026 raises the local rate to 6.8% and excludes 10% of the first $700,000 of value from the local base; on the same levies that lands at 0.5358% — the same 0.54% after rounding.
This page previously published 0.50%, the Census ratio, with that millage arithmetic shown alongside as a cross-check. Denver was the metro where the Census shortcut came closest to a derived rate anywhere in our set — 0.04pp apart, or $2,962 against $3,199. We publish the derived figure now anyway, because "we checked and it agrees" and "this is what a buyer pays" are different claims, and only the second one is what this page asserts.
Then the insurance bill arrives. Denver owners pay $3,040 a year — the third-highest figure in our set, behind Miami and Houston, and far above what Colorado's wildfire-and-flood-free reputation would suggest. The cause is hail. The Front Range sits in one of the most hail-damaged corridors in the country, and a decade of severe convective storm losses has repriced Colorado homeowner's policies accordingly.
So Colorado gives with one hand and takes with the other. The property-tax saving relative to a high-tax state is real and large — about $6,100 a year against Miami's rate on the same house — and about half of it goes straight back out as insurance premium.
What is left is a price problem. At $592,483 against $2,993 a month in rent, Denver's price-to-rent ratio is 16.5 — closer to Austin and Seattle than to Houston. Month one is $4,012 to own versus $3,008 to rent, a gap of about $984 a month, on top of $131,846 in cash to close.
How narrow this result is
This page has now said year 14, then "never within 30 years", then year 22, then year 12, and now year 13 — five answers from five data corrections, none of which was large in dollar terms.
The move to "never" came when we matched the price series to the rent series, raising Denver's price by about 4.6%. The move back to year 22 came when we replaced a Colorado state-average insurance premium of $5,511 with a Denver-metro one of $4,824 — about $57 a month. Year 12 came from replacing that quoted premium with what Colorado's own regulator says carriers charge here: $3,040, or about $149 a month less. This latest move, to year 13, came from deriving the property-tax rate on a buyer's basis instead of taking the Census ratio — a difference of $19 a month.
Changes of $57 and $149 a month should not move a break-even year by a decade each, and $19 a month should not move it at all. That they did is the finding worth taking away. Denver's curves are so nearly parallel over a 30-year window that the crossing point slides in response to almost nothing. Denver is the metro in our set where you should be least willing to accept our defaults and most willing to substitute your own numbers.
The assumption that decides it
At our default 7% assumed return on the renter's invested capital, owning overtakes renting in year 13. At a more conservative 5%, owning breaks even in year 7.
That is a dramatic swing — from past the point most owners have sold to comfortably inside a normal holding period. Denver sits in the middle of our set on this sensitivity: not as opportunity-cost-dominated as Seattle, not as carrying-cost-dominated as Houston. Both levers matter here, which is another way of saying you should not accept either default without thinking about it.
What we are not modelling
Colorado's assessment mechanics are unusually volatile. The residential assessment rate has been the subject of repeated legislative change since the repeal of the Gallagher Amendment: it moved for 2025 to 7.05% for school levies and 6.25% for local-government levies, and it moves again for 2026, to 6.8% on the local-government side with 10% of the first $700,000 of value excluded. Our 0.54% holds across both years on Denver's current levies, but the levies themselves are set annually and a mill-levy override on the ballot would change it.
Our insurance figure covers one county, not the metro. $3,040 is what the Colorado Division of Insurance's data call to 20 carriers — 80% of the market — reports as the average homeowners premium in Denver County, of which $1,547 is the hail component and $30 the wildfire one. It is the only county in this CBSA for which the DOI published a dollar figure, so Adams, Arapahoe, Broomfield, Douglas and Jefferson are not in it, and the DOI does not say what policy period the number covers. We publish it anyway because the alternative is a quote sample, and on this page we have now watched a quote sample move the answer by ten years. Carrying the NAIC's 2023 Colorado average forward at the growth Texas actually recorded over the same years lands at about $3,100, which is close enough to leave the DOI figure as it stands.
Colorado has no real estate transfer tax at the state level, so the national-average transaction costs we apply here are broadly appropriate — unlike our Pittsburgh and Seattle pages, where local transfer taxes materially change the picture.
One national appreciation rate, 3.5%, as on every metro page here. We do not forecast metro-level price growth, because doing so would silently drive the result while looking like a fact.
Check it yourself
Open this Denver scenario in the calculator →
Related reading: when is the right time to buy, which is really a question about holding period — the thing that decides Denver — and how the break-even year works, which explains why a result this close to the edge should not be read as a verdict.