Uncontested Divorce in Colorado — How to End a Marriage Without a Court Fight

The only ground for dissolution in Colorado is that the marriage is irretrievably broken, under C.R.S. § 14-10-110. Nobody proves an affair. Neither spouse has to prove who quit trying first.

At least one of you must have been domiciled in Colorado for 91 days before the petition is filed, under C.R.S. § 14-10-106(1)(a)(I). That is 91, not 90, and two firm websites currently ranking on this search say 90.

Children are a separate question, and it is about parenting orders rather than about ending the marriage. Colorado is generally the state that decides parenting time and decision-making when it is the children’s home state, which C.R.S. § 14-13-102(7) defines as the state where a child has lived with a parent for at least 182 consecutive days immediately before the case is filed, or since birth for a child under six months. A Colorado court can dissolve a marriage without that test being met. What it may not be able to do is enter the parenting orders, which is exactly the kind of gap worth catching before anyone files.

Co-petitioning is the cleaner path. JDF 1010 puts it plainly: if you sign the petition together, you skip the summons, you skip service, and you skip the response.

There is a timing consequence that almost nobody mentions. The 91-day waiting period starts when the court acquires jurisdiction over the respondent, which happens on service, on a signed JDF 1013 Waiver of Service, or on the act of joining as co-petitioner, under C.R.S. § 14-10-106(1)(a)(III). Filing together starts the clock on day one.

Agreeing does not excuse either of you from disclosure. Within 42 days after filing or receiving the petition, each spouse files JDF 1111 Sworn Financial Statement and JDF 1104 Certificate of Compliance, which certifies compliance with C.R.C.P. 16.2(e)(7).

JDF 1104’s checklist reaches more than a dozen categories, including retirement plans, real estate, and insurance documentation. Hold that thought. Those three come back later on this page.

The separation agreement is the document that ends the marriage on your terms. Colorado’s form for it is JDF 1115 Property and Financial Agreement, and where there are children, JDF 1113 Parenting Plan travels with it. Both are submitted as one document the two of you signed together.

We draft these constantly, and this is the document that quietly decides how much of this case comes back.

The court sets an initial status conference within 42 days of filing. It is a case-management appearance, not a trial, and districts handle it differently, including by phone. Ask how your district handles it when a complete agreement is already on file.

No Colorado court can enter a decree before 91 days have run from the triggering event. Filing on affidavit does not shorten it. C.R.S. § 14-10-120.3(2) says so in terms.

The decree is the court’s order ending the marriage and adopting your terms. Under C.R.S. § 14-10-112, terms in the decree stop being contract terms and become judgment terms, enforceable by the remedies available for a judgment, including contempt.

That conversion is the single most important mechanical fact on this page.

Current forms live on the Colorado Judicial Branch’s divorce and separation self-help pages and its divorce forms index. Form numbers and revision dates change; check the index rather than a PDF someone emailed you.

Colorado divides marital property equitably under C.R.S. § 14-10-113, which is not the same as equally and is not community property. Your agreement on property and debt binds the court, unless the court finds it unconscionable after considering your economic circumstances, under C.R.S. § 14-10-112.

We read that provision as leverage and as exposure at the same time, and clients should too.

These three get skipped more than anything else, and each has its own instrument. A retirement account usually needs a separate order to divide it, a house usually needs a deed plus a refinance deadline, and a car loan in both names does not care what your decree says about who drives it.

More on all three in the next section, because this is where agreed cases come back.

Terms about parental responsibilities, support, and parenting time do not bind the court, under C.R.S. § 14-10-112. The court keeps its discretion no matter how completely the two of you agree. That is the clean answer to “why is the judge reviewing something we already settled.”

The guideline calculation lives on our child support page, and we are not re-teaching it here.

A maintenance waiver is a real decision with a long tail, and your agreement can bar later modification of maintenance and property terms if the agreement says so, under C.R.S. § 14-10-112. That same restriction cannot reach child support, decision-making, or parenting time.

Read our spousal maintenance page before you sign a waiver you cannot reopen.

Once your terms are in the decree they are no longer contract terms. C.R.S. § 14-10-112 converts them into judgment terms, enforceable by judgment remedies including contempt.

A term a judge cannot enforce as a judgment produces a motion, not a remedy. “The parties will cooperate to divide the retirement” reads fine at the kitchen table and does nothing at a contempt hearing. “Petitioner shall transfer 50 percent of the account balance as of the date of the decree, by the dividing order the plan requires, prepared within 60 days” is a term with an actor, an amount, an instrument, and a deadline.

That is the drafting difference.

It is four elements, and it is most of our value on an agreed case.

Five recur constantly.

• Retirement. Agreeing to split a 401(k) does not split it. A separate order does, and which order depends on the plan: a qualified domestic relations order for a private employer plan, a different instrument for an IRA, and different ones again for Colorado PERA, military retired pay, and federal civil service. The U.S. Government Accountability Office, in report GAO-20-541 issued July 31, 2020, found that about one-third of people who divorced between 2008 and 2016 and reported a former spouse with a retirement plan also reported losing their claim to those benefits. That is national, self-reported survey data, not a Colorado figure, and we present it as context rather than proof.
• The house. A decree awarding the house to one spouse leaves the other on the mortgage until somebody refinances. Without a refinance deadline and a consequence, the departing spouse’s credit rides on payments they no longer control.
• Taxes and the children. Who claims which child, in which tax year, and what happens in the year the parenting schedule changes. IRS Form 8332 exists for this. Silent agreements produce two returns claiming the same dependent.
• Life insurance securing support. While the case is open, the automatic temporary injunction under C.R.S. § 14-10-107(4) restrains both spouses from canceling, modifying, terminating, or letting lapse any life insurance policy naming either spouse or the minor children as a beneficiary, without at least fourteen days’ advance notice plus either the other party’s written consent or a court order. The same provision covers health, homeowner’s or renter’s, and automobile coverage. That injunction stays in effect only until the final decree is entered, the petition is dismissed, or the court orders otherwise. If the agreement does not carry the obligation forward past the decree, the protection ends at the moment the support obligation starts running.
• Joint debt. A card in both names stays in both names. Your creditor never signed your separation agreement.

A schedule two cooperative parents already run informally converts to paper easily. Holidays are where it breaks: Thanksgiving in even years, winter break split at a named date and hour, and a defined exchange location.

Then comes the harder set.

What happens when one of you moves across town, or to Pueblo, or out of state. Who picks the school. Which parent holds the passports, and who consents to international travel.

Our allocation of parental responsibilities page covers the standard the court applies. This section is about writing the plan so you never need that standard again.

Support terms that do not say what happens when income changes are an invitation. So are terms that leave bonuses, overtime, or self-employment income undefined.

C.R.S. § 14-10-112 lets your agreement bar later modification of maintenance and property terms if it says so, and does not let it reach child support, decision-making, or parenting time. Knowing which of your terms can be locked and which cannot is a drafting decision made once, in a document that takes an afternoon.

If either of you is not a U.S. citizen, timing and terms interact with federal obligations that the decree does not control. Full treatment is two sections down, and it is the section we most want mixed-status readers to finish.

Both spouses sign the sworn financial statement under penalty of perjury.

C.R.C.P. 16.2(e)(10) is why that matters after the case closes.

Under that rule a Colorado court keeps jurisdiction for five years after the final decree to reallocate assets and liabilities that a party materially misstated or left out of the required disclosures. A property division is otherwise final. That five-year provision is the exception, and it is litigated often enough that the Colorado Supreme Court took it up twice in a single year.

An incomplete disclosure leaves a door open behind you for years.

Post-decree is the case you thought was over. A motion to modify, a motion to enforce, a contempt citation, new disclosures, new hearings, and a courtroom you avoided the first time.

Maintenance and child support are modifiable on a showing of changed circumstances that are substantial and continuing under C.R.S. § 14-10-122. Parenting time and decision-making run on their own standards, and our post-decree modifications page walks through both. The post-decree fights we see are rarely about a change in the law. They are about a sentence somebody did not write.

Someone who received conditional permanent residence through the marriage normally files Form I-751 jointly with the spouse during the 90-day period immediately before the conditional residence expires, per USCIS. Where the joint filing requirement is waived, including after a divorce or annulment, USCIS describes filing individually with a waiver request at any time before conditional status expires, and its evidence list calls for the final divorce or annulment decree. A legal separation is not a divorce, and the two are different documents to USCIS.

Colorado’s 91-day waiting period is a Colorado fact. How it lines up with a federal filing window is a question for an immigration attorney, before the separation agreement is drafted, not after.

USCIS states it directly: divorce does not end the sponsorship obligation. The affidavit of support signed at the green-card stage is a separate federal obligation, and it is not what your decree says about maintenance.

A sponsoring spouse who signs a separation agreement believing the decree ends every financial obligation between them has misread the situation. Raise it with an attorney before signing, and we will say the same thing at intake.

Under INA 319(a), an applicant naturalizing as the spouse of a U.S. citizen must remain that spouse from filing until the oath. The USCIS Policy Manual, Volume 12, Part G, Chapter 2, states that a divorce or annulment ends that status whether it happens before or after the application is filed.

Other paths to naturalization exist and are outside this page’s scope. This is the sequencing question to put in front of an immigration attorney early.

Federal law provides routes for a noncitizen spouse who has been abused that do not depend on the other spouse’s cooperation and that carry confidentiality protections, independent of the divorce. A conditional resident subjected to battery or extreme cruelty is also among those USCIS lists as able to request a waiver of the joint I-751 filing requirement. Timing can matter on these routes, and some of it turns on when the marriage legally ends, which is a reason to raise it before a decree enters rather than after.

Our VAWA self-petition page covers the ground.

If this paragraph is about you, call before you file anything.

Say it at the first meeting: who holds what status, how it was obtained, whether anyone signed an affidavit of support, and whether any application is pending. We ask these questions in every family-law intake at Novo Legal Group, in English and in Spanish, and the answers change how the agreement gets written.

No, not in a filed dissolution. The Colorado Bar Association’s Formal Ethics Opinion 68, revised December 9, 2011, states that representation of both parties in a filed dissolution of marriage proceeding is not permissible, and points to Colo. RPC 1.7(b)(3). The same opinion says spouses have conflicting interests on property, support, parental responsibilities, and maintenance even when they have already agreed on the general terms.

Whether the prohibition also reaches joint representation before the case is filed is a question Opinion 68 itself calls unclear, and Colorado has not settled it.

The workable arrangement is that one spouse is the client and the other is an unrepresented party who should have the agreement independently reviewed. We say that out loud at the first meeting rather than after a retainer. The same question comes up on the LLP track. Colorado’s LLP rules of professional conduct are modeled on the attorney rules and include conflict rules, so the answer is a consultation question rather than a workaround.

Often no.

C.R.S. § 14-10-120.3 allows final orders on affidavit, using JDF 1018 Affidavit for Decree Without Appearance, when the statute’s conditions are met. Those conditions are satisfied either where there are no minor children of the marriage and neither spouse is pregnant, or where both parties are represented by counsel or by a licensed legal paraprofessional and have a separation agreement allocating parental responsibilities and setting child support. The statute also requires proper service, no genuine issue of material fact, and either no marital property to divide or an agreement dividing it.

Three limits matter.

The statute says both parties are represented, and one professional cannot represent both spouses in a Colorado dissolution. The affidavit route does not shorten the 91-day waiting period. And the court may still require a hearing on its own motion.

Yes. Each spouse files JDF 1111 Sworn Financial Statement and JDF 1104 Certificate of Compliance within 42 days after filing or receiving the petition, certifying compliance with C.R.C.P. 16.2(e)(7). The statement is signed under penalty of perjury.

Skipping disclosure is also the fastest way to give your ex a reason to reopen the case later.

The court’s filing fee for a dissolution petition is currently listed at $260.00, per the Colorado Judicial Branch list of fees, published January 2025 and governed by statute. What professional help costs depends on your file, so we quote it on a consultation rather than publishing an average that fits nobody.

The comparison that matters is the one in the cost section above. An agreed case handled once costs a fraction of a contested case, and a small fraction of reopening the same case after the decree.

It can, and how depends entirely on the status and how it was obtained, which is why this is a consultation question and not a web-page question. Three touchpoints come up most: conditional residence and Form I-751, the Form I-864 affidavit of support that USCIS says divorce does not terminate, and eligibility to naturalize as the spouse of a U.S. citizen under INA 319(a).

Raise all three with an immigration attorney before the separation agreement is drafted.