Custody Laws in Colorado: Parenting Time, Plans, and Filing

Colorado’s custody laws don’t actually use the word “custody.” The state splits what other jurisdictions call custody into two separate concepts: parenting time, meaning the schedule of when your child lives with each parent, and decision-making responsibility, meaning who has authority over major choices like schooling, medical care, and religion. Both are allocated under C.R.S. § 14-10-124, and both turn on one standard: the best interests of the child, with safety as the paramount concern.¹

Parenting Time and Decision-Making Responsibility

Parenting time is Colorado’s version of physical custody. It covers the school-year schedule, summer breaks, holidays, and special occasions. Judges look at how days and overnights are divided to make sure the child has meaningful, ongoing contact with both parents, unless there is a safety reason to limit contact. Colorado does not favor mothers over fathers or vice versa, and there is no statutory presumption of equal 50/50 time.

Decision-making responsibility is the authority to make significant choices about education, healthcare, religious upbringing, and extracurricular activities. Courts can allocate it several ways. Both parents can share authority over every major decision. Each parent can take sole authority over a specific category. One parent can handle everything. A common split gives one parent final say on medical decisions while both share schooling. The flexibility exists so the arrangement matches how a family actually functions.¹

How Colorado Courts Decide

Every allocation starts and ends with the best interests of the child. C.R.S. § 14-10-124(1.5) sets out the factors a judge must weigh. No single factor controls unless it directly threatens the child’s wellbeing.

For parenting time, the court considers each parent’s wishes and the child’s own preferences if the child is mature enough to reason independently. It looks at the child’s existing relationships with each parent, with siblings, and with anyone else important in the child’s life. It weighs the child’s stability at home, in school, and in the community. It considers each parent’s mental and physical health, each parent’s willingness to encourage the child’s bond with the other parent, past caregiving involvement, geographic proximity between the parents, and each parent’s capacity to put the child’s needs ahead of their own.¹

One protection in the statute is worth calling out directly. A court cannot deny or restrict your parenting time based on a physical or mental disability alone. If the other parent raises your disability, they have to show a specific, concrete effect on your ability to parent.

For decision-making, the court weighs those same factors plus a few more focused on cooperation: whether the parents can realistically make joint decisions, whether their track record shows they can, and whether shared authority over a particular issue would generate so much conflict it would harm the child. When parents have a history of constant disagreement on medical care, for example, judges are more likely to give one parent sole authority in that lane rather than build in guaranteed deadlock.

In contested cases, a judge can appoint a Child and Family Investigator, typically an attorney or mental health professional, to interview the family, visit the home, talk to teachers and therapists, and submit a written report with recommendations. The report carries real weight because the investigator has spent time with the family in ways courtroom testimony can’t replicate.

Domestic Violence and Safety

If a court finds by a preponderance of the evidence that a parent has committed domestic violence, there is a presumption that awarding shared decision-making over the other parent’s objection is not in the child’s best interests. The abusive parent can only overcome that presumption with credible evidence the parents can cooperate safely, without risk to the other parent or child.²

This presumption is often misunderstood. It targets decision-making authority. It does not automatically strip parenting time from a parent with a DV history, though the court can restrict or supervise time if continued contact would endanger the child’s physical health or significantly impair their emotional development.

When a parent files an emergency motion alleging the child faces imminent danger during parenting time, the court must hear the motion within 14 days. While the motion is pending, any parenting time with the accused parent is automatically supervised by an unrelated third party approved by the court or a licensed mental health professional.³

A parent who limits contact to genuinely shield a child from witnessing abuse is protected too. The court cannot count that protective behavior against them when evaluating their willingness to support the child’s relationship with the other parent.¹

The Parenting Plan

Every Colorado case involving children requires a written parenting plan on court form JDF 1113. It is the blueprint the court will enforce. It has to include:

A school-year schedule showing which days and times the child is with each parent
A summer schedule
A holiday and special-occasion rotation that overrides the regular weekly schedule
Transportation arrangements, including who handles pickup and dropoff and where exchanges happen
The allocation of decision-making authority for education, healthcare, religion, and extracurriculars

When both parents agree, they file a stipulated plan for a magistrate to review. When they disagree, each parent submits their own proposed plan and the court chooses at a hearing.⁴

Two provisions the form doesn’t require but many plans include are a right of first refusal (if you can’t personally care for the child during your time for some set period, you offer the other parent the chance to step in before using a babysitter) and electronic communication terms setting expectations for calls, video chats, and texting. A right of first refusal works well between cooperative parents. In high-conflict cases it can become a surveillance tool, so think carefully before insisting on one.

How to File

You start by filing a Petition for Allocation of Parental Responsibilities in the district court of the county where your child lives. The filing fee is $252.⁵ The other parent then has to be formally served. Colorado accepts personal delivery, a signed waiver and acceptance, or, when the other parent can’t be located, publication.

Within 42 days of filing or being served, each parent must submit a Sworn Financial Statement (JDF 1111), any supporting schedules, and a Certificate of Compliance. The court sets an Initial Status Conference, where a family court facilitator identifies the disputed issues and lays out the case timeline.⁶

If you can’t afford the filing fee or mediation costs, Colorado courts allow you to request a fee waiver. The court reviews your financial situation and may reduce or eliminate the fees.

Mediation

Most Colorado judicial districts require parents to attempt mediation before a contested trial. Through the state’s Office of Dispute Resolution, mediation runs $75 per party per hour, with sessions typically scheduled for two hours.⁷ Private mediators charge more; some districts see initial sessions around $150 per person with additional hourly charges after the first two hours. An agreement reached in mediation gets written into the parenting plan and submitted to the court. If mediation fails, the case moves to a contested hearing.

If You Were Never Married

An unmarried parent has to establish legal parentage before they can seek parenting time or decision-making authority. Without it, an unmarried father has no standing to file. Colorado recognizes several routes: a voluntary acknowledgment of parentage signed by both parents and filed with the State Registrar (which carries the same legal weight as a court adjudication); a presumption of parentage, which arises when a person received the child into their home and openly held the child out as their own during the child’s minority, among other circumstances; genetic testing showing a 97 percent or higher probability of parentage; or a formal court adjudication. Once parentage is established, an unmarried parent has the same rights as a married one.⁸

Changing an Existing Order

Colorado sets a deliberately high bar for modifying parenting time or decision-making orders to prevent constant relitigation.

To change parenting time in a way that also shifts where the child lives most of the time, you must show that circumstances have changed since the original order, based on facts that arose afterward or were unknown to the court at the time, and that the change serves the child’s best interests. Once you file such a motion, you generally cannot file another one for two years, with narrow exceptions: the child faces physical danger or serious emotional harm in their current home, or the other parent is planning to relocate.⁹

Modifying decision-making follows a similar path under C.R.S. § 14-10-131, with the same two-year restriction. Your motion has to include a sworn affidavit setting out the specific facts supporting the change. The other parent can file an opposing affidavit, and the court then decides whether there’s adequate cause to hold a hearing at all.

Relocating With a Child

If you want to move with your child to a location that substantially changes the geographic ties between the child and the other parent, you have to give written notice as soon as practicable. The notice must include where you plan to move, why, and a proposed revised parenting time schedule. Colorado does not set a specific mileage threshold. The court evaluates whether the move meaningfully disrupts the other parent’s ability to maintain their relationship with the child.

If the other parent objects, the court holds a priority hearing. On top of the standard best interests factors, the judge considers your reasons for the move, the other parent’s reasons for objecting, the quality of each parent’s relationship with the child since the last order, educational opportunities in both locations, whether extended family lives near the current or proposed location, any advantages of staying with the primary caregiver, the anticipated impact on the child, and whether a workable parenting time schedule is possible if the move goes forward. There is no presumption for or against relocation, and the relocating parent does not automatically carry the burden of proof.⁹

Enforcing a Parenting Time Order

A parenting plan approved by a court is a binding order. When the other parent refuses to follow it, you can file a motion to enforce parenting time under C.R.S. § 14-10-129.5. The court has broad discretion in what it can do, including:

Ordering make-up parenting time for the days that were missed
Imposing a civil fine or a jail sentence for contempt
Requiring the non-complying parent to post a bond or security guaranteeing future compliance
Ordering mediation and requiring the parties to report the results back to the court within 63 days
Any other order the court deems in the child’s best interests

An enforcement motion is the right move when violations are recurring or significant. For occasional scheduling problems, documenting the pattern and communicating directly (or through a parenting app) usually produces a better outcome than filing.¹⁰

Grandparents and Great-Grandparents

Colorado allows grandparents and great-grandparents to petition for visitation, but only in narrow circumstances. There has to be existing judicial involvement in the family: a divorce or legal separation, a custody case, a paternity action, or a probate case where a parent has died or a guardian has been appointed. Without one of those triggers, the court has no authority to grant grandparent visitation. Even when the eligibility conditions are met, the court still applies a best interests analysis under C.R.S. § 14-10-124.4. A grandparent cut off by a still-married, intact family generally has no legal path to compel contact.¹¹

1
FindLaw. Colorado Code 14-10-124 – Best Interests of the Child
2
Colorado General Assembly. Colorado Revised Statutes 2024 – Title 14
3
FindLaw. Colorado Code 14-10-129 – Modification of Parenting Time
4
Colorado Judicial Branch. Parenting Plan – JDF 1113
5
Colorado Judicial Branch. List of Fees
6
Colorado Judicial Branch. Step 1 – Initial Status Conference
7
Colorado Judicial Branch. Office of the Chief Justice Order – Fee Schedule for Dispute Resolution Services
8
Child Welfare Information Gateway. The Rights of Unmarried Parents – Colorado
9
Justia Law. Colorado Revised Statutes Section 14-10-129
10
Colorado Judicial Branch. Instructions to File a Motion to Enforce Parenting Time
11
Colorado Judicial Branch. Request Grandparent or Great-Grandparent Visitation