Colorado repair records: a tenant can ask, and you have ten days

A tenant reported a leak last winter. It was fixed, or you think it was. Now the tenant emails: send me everything you have on it. In Colorado that request has a clock on it, and the clock is shorter than the one for deposit records.

The notices are probably in your portal. The correspondence is in a few inboxes. The photos are the hard part: some on a technician’s phone, some on a vendor’s, some pasted into an invoice. This piece covers what the statute asks you to keep, and how to keep the photos so they are still useful when someone asks. It is not legal advice.

What the statute asks

The rule is C.R.S. 38-12-503(5), part of the warranty of habitability as rewritten in 2024. We read it in the official Colorado Revised Statutes 2026. It has three parts:

• Keep the records. A landlord “shall maintain accurate and complete records of all written notices and correspondence”, and “all documentation relevant to any uninhabitable condition or remedial action taken to remedy or repair a condition that renders a tenant’s dwelling unit uninhabitable” (subsection (5)(a)).
• Keep them for a long time. “For the entire period of the tenant’s occupancy of the dwelling unit and for at least three years thereafter” (subsection (5)(b)).
• Hand them over. On a tenant’s request, you provide “any record, notice, correspondence, or other documentation related to a condition or remedial action within ten calendar days after the tenant’s request” (subsection (5)(c)).

The written notices it refers to are broad. Under subsection (3)(e), notice can be “any writing” that gives you a basis to “substantially know” a condition exists or may exist. That includes letters from a government agency, written notice from a third party, a tenant’s correspondence with your maintenance staff or maintenance provider, and written observations or reports you obtained yourself, directly or indirectly. A note in a vendor’s report can be part of the record even if the tenant never wrote to you.

Does that include photos?

The section doesn’t use the word. It says “documentation”. The deposit section is more explicit: C.R.S. 38-12-103(8) lists “photographs, inspection forms or reports, receipts, invoices, or estimates”. We don’t know of a reason a repair photo would fall outside “all documentation relevant to” a repair, and we would plan on photos being covered. That is our reading, not a ruling. Ask your attorney if it matters to you.

Two requests, two clocks

Colorado now has two document requests that are easy to confuse.

• Repair records: ten calendar days from the tenant’s request, for anything related to a condition or remedial action.
• Deposit records: fourteen days from a written request, for documentation in your “possession or control” relevant to keeping the deposit. This applies to tenancies ending on or after 1 January 2026. We covered it in a separate piece.

The same photo can answer both. A ceiling stain can be a repair you made or a deduction you took, and a tenant moving out may ask for both at once. If your routine is built around fourteen days, the repair request will arrive first.

Why the photos are the weak part

Ten days is short when the file is on someone else’s phone

The statute puts the duty on the landlord, and the repair may have been done by a vendor you used once. If the only copy of the “after” picture is on their technician’s phone, you are asking a favour against a deadline. The time to collect it is the day the work is signed off.

Three years after move-out outlasts most habits

A tenant who stays five years and leaves creates an eight-year record. Over that time staff change, phones are replaced, vendors close and software gets swapped. Count from the end of the tenancy, not from the date of the repair.

The copy you hand over should match the one you kept

A photo sent through a chat app or some portals may be rebuilt on the way, and it can lose its camera record. The picture is still genuine, but it can no longer show when it was taken. If the only copy you have is that one, that is the copy the tenant gets. Keeping the original matters more here than it first seems.

What the record does for you

It isn’t only a burden. Subsection (3) presumes a landlord failed to act in time if an uninhabitable condition is still there 14 calendar days after notice, or 7 days if it materially interferes with life, health or safety. It also presumes that if you missed the contact deadline. You can rebut the presumption by showing you started and kept working but circumstances outside your reasonable control prevented finishing, or that the tenant unreasonably denied entry or delayed the work. A dated run of photos, with the notices and messages around it, is how you would show that. Dated photos support the story. They don’t prove it on their own.

A routine that holds up

1. Open one folder per condition, per unit, on the day the first notice arrives, and put the notice in it.
2. Save your own photos as originals, off the phone by cable or a full-size export, not through a message app.
3. Ask each vendor for original files at sign-off, and make that a term of the work.
4. Log the contact and each visit with its date, including any message to the tenant.
5. Check the batch and fingerprint it when the repair closes. A saved report lists each file’s SHA-256, so you can show later that the files you hand over are the ones you kept.
6. Date the retention. When the tenant moves out, mark the file with move-out plus three years at least, and don’t purge it sooner.
7. Calendar every request the day it arrives, at ten calendar days. Send copies and keep the originals.

The limits, stated plainly

• This is our reading of the statute, and it covers Colorado only. We have not researched court decisions on subsection (5).
• Subsection (5) doesn’t state its own penalty for a late or missing response. We have not worked out what follows from one. The attorney general can bring actions for a pattern or practice of violations of this part (38-12-512), and the tenant remedies are in 38-12-507.
• Some of it is unsettled. Subsection (5)(a) speaks of uninhabitable conditions, while (5)(c) says “a condition or remedial action”, so how far it reaches into routine repairs is not clear to us. The text says “a tenant”, and we can’t say how it applies to a former tenant asking years later. We would keep the records either way. Whether a photo is “documentation” is covered above.
• Part 5 doesn’t apply to some arrangements (38-12-511), and there is an exception on repairs for certain single-family homes (38-12-506). Check whether either touches you.
• A photo with an intact camera record is corroboration, not proof. Camera clocks can be wrong, and camera data can be edited by someone who means to.
• A photo with no camera record is not a fake. Text messages, chat apps and many portals remove the record from genuine photos every day.
• Our checker gives no confidence score and does not judge a picture by looking at it. It reads what is in the file, in your browser, and uploads nothing. A file with no AI marker is not proven real.
• This is not legal advice.

Related: mold photos from a tenant, Colorado deposit photos on request, and where you keep inspection photos.

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