Colorado public records & parcel GIS sources

Easement records in Colorado

We currently index 1 Colorado county by hand, Denver County, recording the recorder-of-deeds search page, the assessor or GIS parcel viewer, and any published map service for each one.

Colorado also publishes 1 statewide source, 6 of which expose machine-readable endpoints you can query directly rather than clicking through a viewer.

About 100% of the indexed Colorado counties publish spatial layers, meaning you can see parcel and corridor geometry rather than only a document index. Median platform reliability across those counties is 84 out of 100. The remainder go down for maintenance, throttle bulk requests, or change URLs without notice.

How to pull an easement document in Colorado

1. Start at the County Clerk and Recorder for the county where the parcel sits: Denver County, CO is linked below and search by the current owner's name or by the book and page cited on Schedule B of your title commitment. Colorado water and ditch rights ride alongside easements far more than in most states, search the index for ditch company names as well as utility names.
2. Pull the plat or subdivision map for the lot. Platted easements are drawn with widths and dimensions, which the deed language often omits entirely.
3. Open the county parcel or GIS viewer to see how recorded corridors sit relative to the boundary. Treat these as approximate: GIS parcel lines are digitized from tax maps and routinely differ from a surveyed line by several feet.
4. Check the statewide and federal sources below for corridors the county will not have. Pipelines, transmission lines, rail, and floodplain or drainage districts are typically mapped at the state or federal level.
5. Order a boundary or ALTA survey before construction. Public records tell you an easement exists; only a survey tells you where it lands on your lot.

Colorado easement record questions

Where are easements recorded in Colorado?

With the County Clerk and Recorder in the county where the land sits. Colorado combines elections, motor vehicle and recording duties into one elected office, the County Clerk and Recorder. Recorded easements, plats and deeds all sit with that office in the county where the land lies. Recording is governed by C.R.S. § 38-35-109 (recording; notice to subsequent purchasers).

Are Colorado easement records free to search?

Searching the index is generally free. Front Range counties run modern search portals with images available for immediate download. Mountain and eastern-plains counties commonly index online but deliver images by email request. Copies are a separate charge: Fees are set by statute on a per-page basis for recording, with separate per-page copy and certification charges. That authority is C.R.S. § 30-1-103 (clerk and recorder fees). Every source listed on this page can be reached without a paid data subscription.

Can an easement exist in Colorado without being recorded?

Yes. Colorado recognizes prescriptive easements after 18 years of open, continuous, and unpermitted use (Colo. Rev. Stat. § 38-41-101), and access by necessity can be implied when a parcel would otherwise be landlocked. Neither appears in a records search, which is why walking the property matters as much as reading the index.

What trips people up when searching Colorado easement records?

Colorado abandoned book and page for modern filings in favor of a sequential reception number. A title commitment citing a reception number will not resolve in a book/page search field, and older documents cited by book and page will not resolve in the reception-number field.

How current are these Colorado sources?

Each county hub carries the date it was last checked by hand, and the oldest verification in Colorado is shown at the top of this page. County offices move URLs and change platforms often, so a hub that has not been verified recently should be treated as a lead rather than a guarantee.