Right to Cure in Colorado: Notice, Cure Amount, and Deadlines

To use the right to cure in Colorado and stop a foreclosure sale, you must file a written notice of intent to cure with your county’s Public Trustee at least 15 calendar days before the scheduled sale date, then deliver the full cure amount to the Trustee’s office by noon on the day before the sale.¹ Hit both deadlines and the foreclosure is withdrawn, your loan continues as if the default never happened, and you keep the house. Miss either one and the sale goes forward.

Who Can Cure and Which Defaults Qualify

If you’ve simply fallen behind on mortgage payments, the right to cure is unconditional. You catch up on what you owe and the foreclosure stops.¹ That covers the overwhelming majority of residential foreclosures.

Non-monetary defaults are a different matter. If the lender claims you breached some other term of the loan, such as letting hazard insurance lapse, the court decides at the Rule 120 hearing whether the default probably occurred. If the order authorizing the sale includes that finding, your right to cure may not apply.² One narrow carve-out: a default consisting of failure to provide financial statements or tax returns to the lender can be cured by handing over the documents and paying all amounts currently due.¹

You aren’t the only person who can file. The statute extends the cure right to anyone with a legal interest in the property, including co-borrowers, guarantors, and junior lienholders. A family member who co-signed, or a second-mortgage holder trying to protect its position, can file the intent to cure and pay the amount owed.

How to File and Pay

Two separate deadlines sit at the heart of the process. Missing either one ends your right to stop the sale.

Step 1: File the Notice of Intent to Cure

Deliver a written notice of intent to cure to the Public Trustee in the county where your property sits, no later than 15 calendar days before the scheduled sale date.¹ Include documentation showing you have a right to cure, such as proof you’re the borrower or hold another qualifying interest. If the sale is continued to a later date, the 15-day deadline shifts with it.³

File early if you can. The sooner your notice is in, the sooner the Trustee can request a cure statement from the lender’s attorney and the more breathing room you have to assemble the funds.

Step 2: Get the Cure Statement

Once the Public Trustee receives your intent to cure, the Trustee contacts the lender’s attorney and asks for an itemized cure statement listing exactly what you owe. The lender may use good-faith estimates for some figures, but the statement must flag anything that isn’t a final number.

Step 3: Pay by Noon the Day Before the Sale

Deliver the full cure amount to the Public Trustee’s office by noon on the day before the sale.¹ Not close of business. Not midnight. Noon. This is where most failed cures collapse: a wire that posts an hour late, a certified check that arrives after lunch, a document the Trustee needs that didn’t make it in. Plan the payment as if the deadline were a full day earlier.

One piece of good news on the amount: you are not paying off the entire mortgage. The cure amount does not include principal that wouldn’t have been due if the lender hadn’t accelerated the loan. You’re paying what regular payments would have covered, plus allowable fees and costs.

What’s in the Cure Amount

Colorado law prescribes the format of the cure statement, which gives you a clean checklist to review:

Each missed monthly payment, listed by count and amount
Late charges that accrued on each missed payment under your loan terms
Property taxes, hazard insurance, or owner association assessments the lender paid on your behalf
Any shortfall in your escrow account, minus any credit balance
Attorney fees, Rule 120 docket and posting fees, court costs, service and postage
Title search fees and property inspection charges
Amounts the lender paid on senior liens to protect its position

After you pay, the lender has seven business days to deliver a final reconciled statement. If an estimated amount came in higher than what was actually incurred, the lender or the Public Trustee must refund the difference to you.¹

Attorney fees deserve a closer look than the rest. The loan documents usually set a formula, but Colorado case law requires those fees to be reasonable, actually incurred, and proportionate to the work performed. Inflated attorney fees are the line item most often worth challenging.

Where the Cure Fits in Colorado’s Foreclosure Timeline

Colorado uses a non-judicial foreclosure run through the county Public Trustee, with a required court step layered on top. The lender starts by filing a Notice of Election and Demand (NED) with the Public Trustee. For most residential properties, the sale is then scheduled roughly 110 to 125 calendar days after the NED is recorded; agricultural properties get about 215 to 230 days. The Public Trustee mails you a combined notice listing the sale date and location, your 15-day deadline to file an intent to cure, and lienholders’ right to file an intent to redeem within eight business days after the sale.³

Before the sale can go forward, the lender must obtain a court order through a Rule 120 hearing in Colorado district court, with notice posted on the property at least 14 days before the hearing. You can appear and contest whether a default actually occurred, which matters most when the lender alleges a non-monetary breach. The lender then has to deliver the Rule 120 order to the Public Trustee by noon on the second business day before the sale; miss that deadline, and the Trustee postpones the sale.²

Federal rules add a buffer before any of that begins. Under the CFPB’s mortgage servicing rules, your servicer cannot make the first foreclosure filing until you are more than 120 days delinquent. If you submit a complete loss mitigation application during that window, the servicer cannot start foreclosure while the application is under review. Even after foreclosure begins, a complete application submitted more than 37 days before the sale blocks the servicer from moving for a sale while you are being evaluated.⁴ The combined notice itself tells you where to complain about dual-tracking violations.³

Add it up and a sale typically can’t happen until at least seven or eight months after your first missed payment. That is real time to explore a modification, repayment plan, or forbearance before you ever have to pull cure funds together.

When You Can’t Pay the Lump Sum: Bankruptcy

Filing bankruptcy triggers an automatic stay that halts the foreclosure the moment the petition is filed, no matter where you are in the Colorado timeline.⁵ The stay doesn’t erase the default; it pauses the clock.

Chapter 13 is the chapter that matters here. A Chapter 13 plan lets you cure the mortgage default over three to five years while you keep making your regular monthly payments going forward. For a homeowner who can handle the regular payment but can’t scrape together the full lump-sum cure amount in time, Chapter 13 is often the more realistic path. Under federal law, you can cure a default on your primary residence through Chapter 13 any time before the property is actually sold at the foreclosure sale.⁶

Lenders can ask the bankruptcy court to lift the stay and will often get it if you have no equity in the property and it isn’t necessary for your reorganization, or if the filing looks like a delay tactic.⁵ If the stay is lifted, the Colorado deadlines resume and you’re back to curing under state law or losing the house.

After You Cure

Once the Public Trustee has the full cure amount, the foreclosure must be withdrawn. The lender or its attorney delivers a withdrawal to the Trustee, who releases the cure funds (minus the Trustee’s own fees) to the lender. Your original loan documents are returned uncancelled, the mortgage stays in place, and you resume regular payments as if the default never happened.¹ Any pending Rule 120 proceeding is withdrawn or the order vacated.

If You Miss the Deadline

If the cure window closes without payment, the sale proceeds. Colorado does not give homeowners a right to redeem the property after the sale. Your chance to save the home closes before the sale, not after. Junior lienholders have an eight-business-day window to file a notice of intent to redeem, but that right belongs to them.³

If the property sells for less than you owe, the lender may pursue a deficiency judgment for the shortfall through a separate legal action. The lender’s sale bid must be at least its good-faith estimate of the property’s fair market value, reduced by unpaid taxes, senior liens, and estimated resale costs. If the lender bid less than that statutory minimum, you can raise it as a defense in any deficiency suit.⁷

The practical lesson runs through every step: the 15-day filing deadline and the noon payment cutoff are hard lines, not suggestions. File the intent to cure as early as you can, request the cure statement promptly, and have funds in a form the Public Trustee can accept well before noon on the day before the sale.

1
Justia. Colorado Code 38-38-104 – Right to Cure When Default Is Nonpayment – Right to Cure for Certain Technical Defaults
2
Justia. Colorado Code 38-38-105 – Order Authorizing Sale
3
Justia. Colorado Code 38-38-103 – Publication
4
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. 12 CFR 1024.41 – Loss Mitigation Procedures
5
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 11 USC 362 – Automatic Stay
6
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 11 USC 1322 – Contents of Plan
7
Justia. Colorado Code 38-38-106 – Bid Required