Utility billing in a Colorado mobile home park: what the law requires

If you own a mobile home park in Colorado and you pass water or other utility costs back to residents, the way you do it is regulated by state law — and the rules are more specific than most owners realize. This page lays out what the Colorado Revised Statutes actually require, with the statute linked inline so you can read it yourself. It is a plain-language summary of public law, not legal advice; when in doubt, read the statute or ask an attorney.

Colorado’s water-billing rules for parks live in C.R.S. § 38-12-212.4, “Required disclosure and notice of water usage and billing — responsibility for leaks.” Everything below is drawn from that section. The primary source is here: C.R.S. § 38-12-212.4 (colorado.public.law).

Who this applies to

The Mobile Home Park Act applies to a mobile home park, which Colorado law (C.R.S. § 38-12-201.5) defines as a parcel of land used for the continuous accommodation of five or more occupied mobile homes operated for pecuniary benefit. If that’s you, the water-billing rules below apply.

The core rule: you can bill actual cost, and not a cent more

The single most important thing in the statute is a cap on what you can charge. Under § 38-12-212.4, park management may not charge a home owner or resident for any costs in addition to the actual cost of water billed to the management by the water provider. In plain terms: you can pass the water bill through, but you cannot mark it up, and you cannot bundle an administrative or convenience fee on top of the water charge itself.

The statute also requires that your billing method be reasonable, equitable, and consistent across home owners and residents — the same defensible math for every lot, not a number that changes depending on who’s asking.

What you have to disclose, and when

The law requires management to give residents, on an annual basis (by January 31 each year), two things:

The methodology by which management calculates the amount charged for both individual and common-area water usage, and
The current residential water rate schedule from the utility provider.

This is the transparency backbone of the statute: residents are entitled to know how their number is produced and to see the underlying rate.

What every monthly bill must show

When you bill for water, § 38-12-212.4 requires the statement to show, at minimum:

the amount owed by that home owner or resident,
the total amount owed by all residents, and
the total amount management actually paid the provider.

That last line is what makes the actual-cost rule enforceable — the resident can see the park’s real bill and check the math against their share.

Leaks: what you can’t bill for

The statute also addresses leaks directly. Management may not bill a resident for water usage caused by a leak in a water line inside the park, and must notify residents within a set window after discovering a leak. If a park-side line leaks, that water isn’t the resident’s to pay for. (Read the exact leak-notice language in the statute — timelines matter and can change.)

Why “timely” compliance is the point

Utility pass-through in mobile home parks is under active regulatory pressure in Colorado and several other states, which means the safe posture isn’t “bill it and hope” — it’s keeping records clean enough that if a resident or the state asks how you got a number, you can show your work in a minute. That means, every month: the actual provider bill on file, a consistent per-lot methodology you can point to, and a statement that shows all three required figures. Owners who do this by hand in a spreadsheet can get it right, but it’s slow and it’s easy to drift out of the “reasonable, equitable, and consistent” standard when you’re doing the math one lot at a time under time pressure.

Where a tool helps

The compliance work here is mostly about consistency and documentation — exactly what software is good at. A billing tool that applies one methodology to every lot, pulls the actual provider cost through without a markup, and produces a monthly statement showing the resident’s share, the park total, and what management paid gives you a defensible record without the monthly by-hand grind.

That’s the narrow thing we’re building for Colorado parks under 50 lots — flat price, no demo call, and utility pass-through that stays audit-ready by design. If keeping your water billing defensible is the pain, tell us about your park below. (This page summarizes public law as of its verified date; always confirm the current statute at the linked source before setting policy.)