Severance Agreement Review for Colorado Professionals

An individual waiver of age claims requires a period of at least 21 days to consider the agreement. Where the separation is part of an exit incentive or a group termination program, the period is at least 45 days, and the employer also has to disclose in writing the decisional unit, the eligibility factors, and the job titles and ages of everyone selected and not selected within that unit (29 U.S.C. § 626(f); 29 CFR § 1625.22).

That disclosure list is data. Titles and ages, unit by unit, is the closest most people ever get to seeing the shape of how a selection was made.

One rule inside 29 CFR § 1625.22 gets missed constantly: a material change to the final offer restarts the 21-day or 45-day period, while a change that is not material does not, and the parties can agree in advance that changes will not restart it.

After you sign an age-claim waiver, you have at least 7 days to revoke it. The regulation is explicit that this period cannot be shortened by the parties, by agreement or otherwise (29 CFR § 1625.22).

Signature day is not the last day.

The 21-day, 45-day, and 7-day windows come from a statute that protects workers 40 and over who are releasing age claims. A 34-year-old engineer releasing a retaliation claim is not covered by those provisions, and neither is a separation agreement that never touches the ADEA.

What governs then is ordinary Colorado contract law, whatever the agreement itself says, and a federal requirement that any release of a federal discrimination claim be knowing and voluntary on the totality of the circumstances. No statutory minimum, no automatic revocation right.

That gap is worth knowing before you accept a competing page's summary as if it applied to you.

An expiration date printed in a packet is a term the employer chose. A statutory consideration period is a floor set by federal law, and the two can conflict on the same page of the same document.

We treat those as separate questions, and we look at which one the agreement's own language actually invokes.

Employers frequently set a deadline shorter than the reader assumes it must be, and sometimes longer than the statute requires. The date that controls a specific agreement depends on the agreement, on whether an ADEA waiver is in it, and on whether the separation was part of a group program, so it is worth confirming before it passes rather than after.

A general release is a promise not to sue on anything that had already happened when you signed. Claims that arise after the signature date are outside it, which is why the date matters as much as the language.

Read the definition of "Released Parties" carefully. It usually reaches past your employer to parent companies, subsidiaries, officers, directors, benefit plans, and individual supervisors by name or by category.

Some rights are not yours to sign away, and a provision that tries is unenforceable as to them. The EEOC's 2009 guidance on waivers in severance agreements identifies the core list: the right to file a charge and to testify, assist, or participate in an EEOC investigation; unemployment benefits; workers' compensation benefits; vested retirement benefits under ERISA; COBRA continuation rights; and wage claims under the Fair Labor Standards Act, which as a general matter cannot be released privately without Department of Labor or court approval. Colorado adds its own backstop on the first of those money items: C.R.S. § 8-80-101 makes any agreement to waive or release unemployment rights void.

Here is the half that most pages leave out, and it is the half that matters to a decision.

You keep the right to file with the EEOC or the Colorado Civil Rights Division and to participate in the agency's investigation. What a valid general release ordinarily takes is your own monetary recovery on the claims you released. Anyone telling you that signing costs you nothing because you can still file a charge is describing half of the rule.

C.R.S. § 24-34-407, enacted by the POWR Act, is the most under-covered provision on this entire subject and the easiest one to check against your own paper. A nondisclosure provision that limits your ability to disclose alleged discriminatory or unfair employment practices is void unless it satisfies six enumerated requirements.

Among them: the provision has to say expressly that it does not restrain you from disclosing the underlying facts to your immediate family, a religious advisor, a medical or mental health provider, legal counsel, or a financial or tax advisor, from reporting to a government agency without notifying your employer, from responding to legal process, or from disclosing as otherwise required by law. It also has to state that such a disclosure does not constitute disparagement.

Liquidated damages have to be reasonable, proportionate to anticipated actual loss, varied by the severity of the breach, and not punitive. A violation carries a penalty of $5,000, plus actual damages, costs, and attorney fees in a private action.

Cooperation obligations commit you to future hours, sometimes unpaid, sometimes for years. Claw-back provisions let the company take the money back on conditions you have not read yet. Reference language decides what a future employer hears when they call, and "neutral reference" means different things in different agreements.

Unvested equity is the line professionals lose the most on, and it usually vanishes on the separation date without a sentence anywhere in the packet drawing your attention to it.

One more, if the agreement touches trade secrets or confidential information: 18 U.S.C. § 1833(b) requires the employer to give notice of the federal whistleblower immunity in any such agreement entered into or updated after May 11, 2016, and an employer that omits the notice cannot recover exemplary damages or attorney fees against that employee.

Under C.R.S. § 8-2-113, as amended by HB 22-1317 (effective August 10, 2022), a covenant not to compete is void unless it fits a statutory exception. The exception that matters here permits a non-compete for the protection of trade secrets only where the worker earns annualized cash compensation at or above the threshold for highly compensated workers, and the worker has to meet that threshold both when the covenant is signed and when the employer tries to enforce it.

For 2026 the threshold is $130,014, set by the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment's 2026 PAY CALC Order at 7 CCR 1103-14, adopted December 8, 2025 and effective February 1, 2026. The Division republishes the figure each year.

The two-point test is the part almost no competing page mentions, and it is directly relevant to a covenant you are being asked to sign on your way out the door.

A covenant restricting solicitation of customers is permitted for workers earning at least 60% of the highly compensated threshold, which for 2026 works out to $78,008.40 (sixty percent of $130,014; the Division does not publish the non-solicit figure separately), and only where the covenant is no broader than reasonably necessary to protect the employer's legitimate interest in protecting trade secrets.

A lower bar, and a real one.

Notice has to come in a separate document, in clear and conspicuous terms, signed by the worker. For a current worker, the notice is due at least fourteen days before the earlier of the covenant's effective date or the effective date of the additional compensation or change in terms that serves as its consideration.

A violation carries a statutory penalty of $5,000 per worker or prospective worker harmed, plus actual damages, injunctive relief, and reasonable attorney fees in a private action. For a Colorado worker, the statute also blocks an out-of-state forum and applies Colorado law to enforceability.

Look at where the restriction first appeared.

A covenant buried inside a release, delivered on the day you were told the package is standard, with no separate signed notice and no fourteen-day lead time, is a covenant whose delivery does not match what § 8-2-113 requires for a current worker. How that requirement applies when the consideration is severance paid at separation is a question courts have not fully worked through. It is the first thing we ask about when a packet arrives with a restrictive covenant in it.

Title VII covers employers with 15 or more employees and the ADEA covers 20 or more. C.R.S. § 24-34-401 defines "employer" as the state and its subdivisions and "every other person employing persons within the state," with no numerical qualifier at all.

A 9-person startup is outside Title VII and inside CADA.

The Protecting Opportunities and Workers' Rights Act, SB 23-172, took effect August 7, 2023. It redefined harassment to drop the hostile-work-environment requirement and the severe-or-pervasive threshold, added marital status as a protected class, narrowed the employer's disability defense, set the enforceability requirements for employment nondisclosure provisions at C.R.S. § 24-34-407, and imposed five-year personnel record retention with a designated complaint repository.

What POWR did not do is equally worth stating: it changed no damages cap, no remedy, and no filing deadline. Pages claiming Colorado abolished its damages caps are describing a bill that does not exist.

HB 22-1367, effective August 10, 2022, repealed the age-discrimination-only bar on recovering compensatory and punitive damages under CADA. Age claims now reach the same remedies as every other CADA claim, subject to the same § 24-34-405(3) caps.

The consequence for a severance packet is direct. An OWBPA waiver signed in Colorado in 2026 releases more than the identical waiver released in 2021.

Every other restriction in this area gets harder to escape as compensation rises. C.R.S. § 8-2-113 works the other way: the threshold is a ceiling on enforceability, the notice requirements are procedural traps for the employer, and the $5,000 penalty runs to the worker.

We read the agreement you were handed and tell you what it does. That means the release scope and the parties it covers, the consideration and revocation windows and whether they were satisfied, the restrictive covenants measured against C.R.S. § 8-2-113 and the current threshold, the nondisclosure and non-disparagement clauses measured against C.R.S. § 24-34-407, and the treatment of bonus, commission, equity, and benefits at separation.

The output is an assessment of the document in front of you. Not a form letter about severance agreements generally.

We do not contact your employer as part of a review, and we do not need to. What you send us and what you tell us is confidential, and the duty runs whether or not you hire us.

The truthful boundary is this: if you later decide to file a charge with the EEOC or the CCRD, or to file suit, that step is a formal proceeding and your employer is notified of it as a matter of process. That decision stays yours. We will tell you what it would involve before you make it, not after.

There are three ways this ends. You sign it as written, you negotiate terms and then sign, or you preserve and pursue a claim.

Each one closes something. We walk through what each road gives up, including the deadlines each one starts or ends, and you decide. We do not predict outcomes, and no one should tell you what a claim is worth from across a conference table before reading the file.

Send the full severance agreement, including every exhibit and attachment. Then add:

• Your offer letter and any later compensation agreements
• The current comp or commission plan
• Equity grant agreements and vesting schedules
• Recent performance reviews, and any PIP
• Any HR complaint you filed, and the response
• The written notice of any non-compete, if you were given one separately

Send the versions you actually received, not clean copies. Dates and delivery method matter as much as the text.

Where the document review surfaces a claim, the analysis moves to the substance of it. Sex and pregnancy discrimination in Colorado is covered separately. Disability discrimination and failure to accommodate under the ADA and CADA is covered separately as well.

That depends on what the agreement says, what claims you have, and what the windows in it are, and no page can answer it for a specific document. What a lawyer does with the question is read the release scope, check whether the consideration and revocation periods were satisfied, price the restrictive covenants against C.R.S. § 8-2-113, and identify what the release would foreclose. The answer is a document analysis, not a rule of thumb.

Yes as to filing, and this right cannot be waived. The EEOC's guidance and 29 CFR § 1625.22 both state that no waiver may be used to interfere with an employee's right to file a charge or participate in a Commission investigation. What a valid general release ordinarily takes is your own monetary recovery on the released claims, which is why "you can still file" is only half the answer.

For 2026 the threshold question is whether your annualized cash compensation reaches $130,014, both when you signed and when the employer seeks to enforce. Even above the threshold, the covenant has to fit a statutory exception under C.R.S. § 8-2-113 and the employer has to have delivered a separate, clear, signed notice at least fourteen days ahead for a current worker. A covenant that first appears inside a severance packet frequently fails the notice requirement. For a physician, advanced practice registered nurse, or dentist, the threshold does not decide it: a covenant restricting their practice in Colorado is void at any compensation level.

Not from us. We do not contact your employer as part of reviewing your agreement, and what you send us is confidential. If you later choose to file a charge or a lawsuit, that filing is a formal step and your employer is notified through the process, which is a decision you make with full information rather than a consequence of asking a question.

The revocation window is where this starts. An age-claim waiver carries at least 7 days after signature, and that period cannot be shortened by agreement. Past that, a release that fails the OWBPA's requirements does not bar an ADEA claim, and the Supreme Court held in Oubre v. Entergy Operations, Inc., 522 U.S. 422 (1998), that keeping the severance payment does not ratify a defective release. Whether that doctrine reaches a particular agreement is a question about that agreement, and the administrative filing deadlines keep running while it is being answered.