Colorado Springs collects its own sales tax, separate from the state

Ring up a sale anywhere inside Colorado Springs and the tax on the receipt splits between offices. The city handles its own share.

As a home-rule city, Colorado Springs has chosen to be self-collected: it administers and gathers its own sales and use tax rather than passing that job to the state. The Colorado Department of Revenue takes the other pieces a customer pays here, including the state share, the El Paso County share, and the PPRTA transportation share. The city share stays under the city’s own roof.

A shopper never notices any of this, paying one total at the register. The split lands squarely on small-business owners and anyone selling goods in town. In a self-collected city, you may file and remit to two places: the City of Colorado Springs for the city portion, and the state for the portions the state gathers. The city’s rules, definitions, and forms can differ from the state’s, so what counts as taxable or exempt is not always the same on both returns.

A state tool, the Sales and Use Tax System (SUTS), lets some businesses send one combined return to the state and to participating home-rule cities. Whether it fits your case is worth a look, since not every city or filing method qualifies.

Opening or running a business here, the first thing to nail down is how the city wants you to register and file. The City of Colorado Springs Sales Tax office and the state’s local-government sales tax page both lay out how self-collected cities work.