Landlord Atlas

How much notice must a landlord give before entering in Colorado?

Verified July 9, 2026 All Colorado topics →

Colorado has no general statute requiring advance notice before a landlord enters a rental home — notice periods, purposes, and timing are governed by the lease, so a well-drafted entry clause matters more here than in most states.

The exceptions are narrow and specific: bed-bug inspections and treatments require at least 48 hours' written or electronic notice (the lease can set a different minimum, and tenants may not unreasonably refuse access), and entry to make warranty-of-habitability repairs runs on the tenant's own permission, which shortens the landlord's repair deadline to 96 hours when granted with the repair request. Emergency entry rests on common law and lease terms rather than any statutory carve-out. Landlords should not import the 24- or 48-hour general rules of neighboring states — in Colorado, outside bed bugs, the statute book is silent.

Colorado entry notice at a glance

Advance notice required No fixed statutory period (see notice standard)
Notice standard No general entry-notice statute exists for standard residential rentals — entry rights and notice are left to the lease. The whole of Title 38, Article 12 was checked: the only statutory notice period is the bed-bug provision, C.R.S. 38-12-1004(1), requiring reasonable written or electronic notice at least 48 HOURS before entry for bed-bug inspection or treatment (a rental agreement may set a different minimum, and the tenant may not unreasonably deny access). Warranty-of-habitability repairs work through tenant-granted permission: the landlord's remediation clock drops to 96 hours only when the tenant's notice of the condition includes permission to enter (38-12-503(2)(b)(II)).
Permitted reasons Whatever the lease provides, plus the statutory bed-bug inspection/treatment access (38-12-1004) and habitability-repair entry with tenant permission (38-12-503). No statutory purpose list exists.
Emergency exception Not addressed by statute
Time-of-day restrictions Not addressed by statute

Notes and caveats

notice_hours is null because no general requirement exists — the 48-hour figure belongs ONLY to bed-bug entry under 38-12-1004 and must not be generalized (encode the same way as the CO-specific analog of the schema's null-plus-notes convention). emergency_exception is null per the GA/NC/MA convention: no statutory emergency provision exists, and asserting one would overstate the law. The bed-bug notice is 48 hours — 'forty-eight hours' verbatim in the statute (a 47-hour figure appeared in this project's own session prep notes and is wrong). Parts 1, 2-2.5, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, and 12-14 of Article 12 were checked for entry provisions; none impose a general notice rule. Local codes and the lease control in practice — out of scope v1, flagged for page copy.

Statute citations

How this record was verified: Colorado's official CRS text is published via LexisNexis without stable deep links (GA-class sourcing situation), so verification pairs official session-law sources with current code mirrors: the HB25-1249 enrolled act read verbatim from the official leg.colorado.gov PDF (full text extracted) and re-confirmed against the official bill-page summary (independent reads matched on the 30-day return deadline, wrongful-retention standard, 125% presumption, walk-through, and carpet/paint rules, and confirmed NO deposit-cap change); official bill pages read for SB23-184 (deposit cap), SB21-173 (late fees), HB21-1121 (rent-increase notice/frequency), HB23-1068 (pet deposits), HB23-1115 (rent-control repeal — died), HB25-1092 and HB26-1047 (died), and SB26-054 (PCOA exemption, eff. 2026-11-01). Statute text quoted from the colorado.public.law and FindLaw mirrors (official: false), with §§ 38-12-105 and 38-12-701 each read on the mirror twice via independent fetches that matched. Checked 2026-07-09.