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

Colorado’s custody laws don’t actually use the word “custody.” The state splits what most people call custody into two separate things: parenting time (the schedule of when your child is with each parent) and decision-making responsibility (who decides major questions about school, medical care, and religion). Both are allocated under C.R.S. § 14-10-124, and every allocation has to serve the child’s best interests, with safety treated as the top priority.¹

The Two Things a Court Actually Allocates

Parenting time is Colorado’s version of physical custody. It covers school-year weeks, summers, holidays, and special occasions. Judges want your child to have meaningful, ongoing contact with both parents unless safety concerns justify restrictions. There is no presumption favoring mothers or fathers, and there is no statutory presumption of equal 50/50 time.

Decision-making responsibility is the authority to make significant choices about your child’s education, healthcare, religious upbringing, and extracurricular activities. The court can split this up in several ways. Both parents can share authority on everything. Each parent can get sole authority over specific categories (one parent on medical, both on schooling, for example). Or one parent can handle all of it. The arrangement is supposed to match how your family actually functions.¹

What the Court Weighs

C.R.S. § 14-10-124(1.5) lists the factors the judge has to consider. No single one controls unless it goes directly to safety.

For parenting time, the court looks at each parent’s wishes, the child’s preferences if the child is mature enough to express reasoned opinions, the child’s existing relationships with each parent and siblings, the child’s current stability at home and school, the mental and physical health of everyone involved, each parent’s willingness to encourage the child’s relationship with the other parent, each parent’s past involvement, geographic proximity between the parents, and each parent’s ability to put the child’s needs ahead of their own.

One factor is worth calling out because it’s written straight into the statute: a disability by itself cannot be the basis for denying or restricting your parenting time. If the other parent raises your physical or mental disability, they have to show a specific, concrete impact on your ability to parent.¹

For decision-making, the court weighs the same factors and adds a few more: whether the parents can realistically cooperate, whether their history shows they actually work together, and whether forcing shared decision-making on a specific issue would create so much conflict that it harms the child. If you have a track record of fighting over medical care, the court is more likely to give one parent sole authority over health decisions than to build a structure that guarantees deadlock.¹

Domestic Violence Changes the Analysis

If the court finds by a preponderance of the evidence that a parent has committed domestic violence, there is a presumption that giving that parent 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 that the parents can safely cooperate on decisions without risk.²

The presumption is often misunderstood. It targets decision-making authority. It does not automatically eliminate parenting time. Parenting time can still be awarded, though the court can restrict or supervise it when 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 it within 14 days. During that window, any parenting time with the accused parent is automatically supervised by an unrelated third party approved by the court or by a licensed mental health professional.³

If you’ve been limiting the other parent’s contact to protect your child from witnessing domestic violence, that protective behavior cannot be held against you when the court evaluates your willingness to foster the child’s relationship with the other parent.¹

The Parenting Plan

Every Colorado case involving children ends in a parenting plan. The court uses form JDF 1113, which spells out:

The school-year schedule
The summer schedule
A holiday and special occasion rotation that overrides the regular weekly schedule
Transportation and exchange logistics
Who has final authority on education, healthcare, religious upbringing, and extracurriculars

If both parents agree, you file a stipulated parenting plan for a magistrate to review. If you don’t agree, each parent submits a proposed plan and the court decides at a hearing.⁴

Filing a Case

You start by filing a Petition for Allocation of Parental Responsibilities in the district court of the county where the child lives. The filing fee is $252.⁵ You then have to formally serve the other parent with the petition and summons. Colorado allows personal delivery, a signed waiver and acceptance, or publication by consolidated notice when the other parent can’t be located.

Within 42 days of filing or receiving the petition, each party has to submit a Sworn Financial Statement (JDF 1111), any required supporting schedules, and a Certificate of Compliance. The court schedules an Initial Status Conference where a family court facilitator sets deadlines, identifies disputed issues, and lays out the case timeline.⁶

If you can’t afford the filing fee or mediation costs, you can ask the court for a fee waiver. The court evaluates your situation based on your sworn financial statement and may reduce or eliminate fees.

Mediation

Most Colorado judicial districts require you to try mediation before going to trial. Through the state’s Office of Dispute Resolution, mediation runs $75 per party per hour, with sessions usually set for two hours.⁷ Private mediators charge more. If you reach an agreement in mediation, it gets written into the parenting plan and submitted. If you don’t, the case goes to a contested hearing.

If You Were Never Married to the Other Parent

Unmarried parents have to establish legal parentage before they can seek parental responsibilities. Without that, an unmarried father has no standing to request parenting time or decision-making authority. Colorado recognizes several paths:

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 based on circumstances like receiving the child into your home and openly holding the child out as your own while the child was a minor
Genetic testing showing a 97 percent or higher probability of parentage, which establishes presumed parentage
A formal court adjudication of parentage, which either parent can petition for

Once parentage is established, an unmarried parent has the same rights as a married parent to petition for parental responsibilities.⁸

Changing an Order Later

The bar for modifying an existing parenting time or decision-making order is deliberately high. The point is to keep parents from relitigating settled arrangements.

To change parenting time in a way that also shifts where the child primarily lives, you have to show that circumstances have changed based on facts that either arose after the original order or weren’t known to the court at the time, and you have to show the change serves the child’s best interests. After filing that kind of motion, you generally cannot file another one for two years. The exceptions: the child faces physical danger or serious emotional harm in their current living situation, or the other parent plans to relocate.⁹

Modifying decision-making responsibility works similarly under C.R.S. § 14-10-131, with the same two-year restriction. Your motion has to include a sworn affidavit laying out the specific facts supporting the change. The other parent gets a copy and can file their own affidavit, and the court decides whether there’s adequate cause to even hold a hearing.

Relocating With the 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 provide written notice as soon as practicable. The notice has to include where you plan to move, why, and a proposed revised parenting time schedule. Colorado doesn’t define a mileage threshold. The court looks at whether the move meaningfully disrupts the other parent’s ability to maintain their relationship with the child.⁹

If the other parent objects, the court holds a priority hearing and considers all the standard best interests factors plus relocation-specific ones: your reasons for moving, the other parent’s reasons for objecting, the quality of each parent’s relationship with the child since the last order, educational opportunities at each location, where extended family lives, any advantages of staying with the primary caregiver, the anticipated impact on the child, and whether the court can fashion a workable parenting time schedule if the move is allowed.

There is no presumption for or against relocation, and the relocating parent does not automatically carry the burden of proof. The court simply weighs the totality of the circumstances.⁹

When the Other Parent Won’t Follow the Order

A parenting plan backed by a court order is legally binding. If 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 can:

Order make-up parenting time for the days you missed
Impose a civil fine or jail sentence for contempt
Require the non-complying parent to post a bond or security to guarantee future compliance
Order mediation and require the parties to report results back within 63 days
Enter any other order the court finds is in the child’s best interests

Enforcement motions are the right move for recurring or significant violations. For occasional scheduling problems, documenting the pattern and communicating directly (or through a parenting app) usually produces better results than running back to court each time.¹⁰

Grandparents and Great-Grandparents

Grandparents and great-grandparents can petition for visitation in Colorado, but only when there is already some judicial involvement in the family: a divorce or legal separation, a custody or parentage case, or a probate case involving the death of a parent or appointment of a guardian. Without one of those triggers, the court has no authority to grant grandparent visitation. Even when eligibility is met, the court evaluates the request under C.R.S. § 14-10-124.4 and grants visitation only if it serves the child’s best interests. A grandparent cut off by a still-married, intact family generally has no legal avenue 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