Annual economic output
$1 trillion
Colorado annual GDP by 2035, in future dollars, with real growth and household outcomes alongside it.
$584.3B2025 nominal GDP in the September 29 snapshot. Refresh the GDP vintage before public release.
Start here: a five-minute tour Explore the look, the comparisons and the direction.
01 / Explore Colorado
Select a county and switch between job growth, pay and housing pressure. Compare states or industries next.
02 / Test the mission paths
Adjust annual capital or payroll growth. See what the assumptions imply for the 2026–2035 window.
03 / Shape what comes next
Explore changing forms of work and the missing evidence that could become a CII initiative.
For discussion: Does this feel like CII? Which comparison would change a real decision? Which missing measure should we pursue first? Public observations, illustrative scenarios and proposed research are labeled throughout.
01 / Public evidence
Compare the conditions for progress.
Start with employment, pay and housing pressure. Keep each dimension visible so a strong result in one does not conceal a weakness in another.
Colorado · employment growth
Select a countyCommon measures / Common periods
Compare a state's results with Colorado and the U.S.
The table below keeps the same definitions for every state. District of Columbia is optional and remains labeled separately.
A state can improve in absolute terms while other states improve faster. Read change and peer position together.
The national rate is calculated from national totals. It is not an average of state rates.
Comparison matrix
Select and copy into a text file or spreadsheet. This view follows the current filters and ordering.
| Place | Covered jobs 2025 | Net change 2024–25 | Growth 2024–25 | Annual pay 2025, current $ | Rent burden 2020–24, ±90% MOE |
|---|
These are separate measures with different observation periods. Sorting shows reported values, not an overall effectiveness ranking. Industry mix, population and local conditions can explain differences.
Sources, uncertainty and definitions
BLS QCEW 2025 and 2024: annual average covered payroll positions, all ownerships and industries; includes full- and part-time jobs. Average annual pay is total annual wages divided by annual average employment. It is not median earnings or pay per hour. Jobs are measured at workplaces, and a person can hold more than one.
Census ACS 2020–24, B25070: renter households spending at least 30% of income on gross rent, among cash-rent households with a computed ratio. Five-year estimates describe a period. Derived 90% margins of error are approximate and omit covariance. Cross-hatching marks margins wider than ±10 percentage points, a display rule rather than an official reliability cutoff. Do not use small differences to make fine rankings.
County boundaries: Census TIGERweb, retrieved September 30, 2026 and simplified for display. Counties are not municipal permitting jurisdictions. Employment and household snapshot: September 29, 2026. Missing values remain missing. County totals exclude the separately reported unallocated category. The comparison-size filter uses one-half to twice the focus place's payroll employment and does not establish structural equivalence.
02 / Where employment changes
See the differences behind the statewide total.
Colorado private-sector employment, split into 20 industry sectors. Employment growth and average pay describe different parts of the result.
Employment growth and annual pay
Each dot is one industry. Higher pay can reflect occupations, hours and workforce composition. This comparison does not rank innovation quality.
| Private industry | Jobs · 2025 | Net change | Growth | Annual pay · 2025 |
|---|
A useful next comparison would follow firms of similar age, size and industry, including closures and departures. A rise in sector employment alone cannot identify the contribution of innovation or CII.
Industry coverage and source
BLS Colorado 2025 and 2024, retrieved September 30, 2026. Private ownership (5), sector aggregation (54), all establishment sizes (0). The 20 sectors include unclassified establishments. Their sum is 2,432,730, three above the published private-sector total of 2,432,727, consistent with rounding of annual averages. This scope excludes government employment; the Compare places view includes all ownerships. Zero and suppressed values must not be conflated. Every displayed sector is published in both years.
03 / Direction and scale
Three missions. A common 2035 horizon.
Keep observed conditions, target arithmetic and CII's documented contributions distinguishable. Complete capital and opportunity progress totals are still being defined.
Capital attracted
$75 billion
Working window: 2026–2035. Proposed accounting follows eligible funds reaching Colorado companies or projects.
About $3.7B / year2023–25 average VC deal value classified as wholly out-of-state funded. A partial component reference; not the full capital mission baseline.
Work and opportunity
500,000
New jobs and opportunities, 2026–2035. The definition will need to accommodate how work changes.
2,891,626 covered jobs2025 annual average payroll employment. One observed part of the economy; it is not a count of all earning opportunities.
Explore the scale of a ten-year path
Adjust annual amounts to see arithmetic consequences. These inputs are scenarios; they do not predict how much capital or work Colorado will generate.
| Checkpoint | Cumulative capital | Net payroll change | Payroll employment level |
|---|
The 2025 annual average is the employment anchor. The capital accounting period starts January 1, 2026. Missing 2026 observations are unknown, not zero. Dollar bases and opportunity eligibility remain proposed.
Mission sources and accounting limits
GDP: BEA via FRED, archived September 29 snapshot. Capital component: Innosphere's January 2026 report, rounded 2023–25 values from the investor-location chart. Mixed-investor funding and incomplete classification prevent a full external-capital total. The component should not be added to all-company VC. The $75B scenario assumes total qualifying inflows, with improvement over historical pace tracked separately.
Payroll-only +500,000 implies 3,391,626 jobs in 2035 and roughly 1.61% compound annual growth. This equivalence does not settle the mission's opportunity definition. Statewide progress does not establish CII attribution.
04 / An economy whose forms of work may change
Measure people's capacity to earn and contribute.
Payroll employment remains useful evidence. The measurement framework should also accommodate portfolio careers, independent work and forms of help that rely on judgment, taste, discernment and relationships.
Joseph's working hypothesis, September 30, 2026: work may become less centered on full-time W-2 employment. The direction and scale of that change remain uncertain. The measures below are proposals for learning about it.
Earning capacity
Can people make a durable living?
- Net earned income across all paid activities, after work expenses.
- Effective earnings per total hour, including coordination and administration.
- Income volatility, unpaid gaps and dependence on the largest client or employer.
Candidate collection: a consenting longitudinal participant panel. Counts of projects or clients would not become counts of unique people.
Choice and resilience
Does work fit a life?
- Control over schedule, workload and accepting or declining work.
- Continuity of health coverage and other protections across paid activities.
- Ability to absorb a lost client or move between forms of work.
Candidate collection: short repeat surveys, with consistent questions and the option to decline sensitive items.
Judgment and relationships
Does the help improve the outcome?
- Recipient-assessed usefulness and the decision or problem that improved.
- Follow-through, repeat engagement and evidence from completed work.
- Time and coordination costs borne by everyone involved.
Candidate method: shared case rubrics and recipient feedback. A universal score for a person's taste or relational value is not defined.
Contribution beyond paid work
What support makes participation possible?
- Access to trusted help, mentoring, caregiving and reciprocal support.
- Whether receiving help enables paid work, learning or a better life.
- Whether contributing creates an unwanted burden or strengthens agency.
Report social contribution separately from paid earning outcomes. Its inclusion in the 500,000 mission would require an explicit common counting rule.
What would count as evidence?
Track the same people across time and work modes. Keep the starting position, total earnings, costs, hours, quality of life and follow-up completion. Include setbacks and people who leave a program.
Proposed cadence: a baseline, brief quarterly check-ins and annual review. Start by testing whether the burden is acceptable and the answers are useful.
Use public employment, self-employment and multiple-jobholding statistics for context. A business registration, training completion or new profile is an activity signal, not proof of a durable earning opportunity.
05 / First decision brief
Can we compare the time to expand a business?
Initial feasibility check: a comparable commercial tenant improvement in Boulder and Denver, with Fort Collins screened as another possible participant.
Finding: the public feeds measure different parts of the process.
Boulder supports an application-based cohort. Denver's inspected feed is restricted to issued commercial permits, with an issue date defined as the date the permit was paid. Fort Collins' current public layer has no application or issue-date fields. Comparing a simple average from these feeds would give a misleading impression of relative speed.
207Boulder non-residential
applications filed in 2025
applications filed in 2025
173have a reported
issue date
issue date
34have no reported issue date;
statuses need separate treatment
statuses need separate treatment
All 207 records were retrieved; the independent source count and distinct PermitID count both equal 207. There were no reverse or future issue dates in this extract. These are coverage findings, not measured jurisdiction performance. Of 24 records classified as Tenant Finish, 21 have issue dates and three do not.
| Jurisdiction / inspected source | What it supports | What the comparison still needs |
|---|---|---|
| Boulder Construction Permits | Applied and issued dates, status, work type and project scope fields. 2025 non-residential cohort verified. | Completeness, review and applicant-response events; consistent tenant-improvement scope; fees and outcome-quality measures. Confirm denominator completeness with the source owner. |
| Denver Commercial Construction Permits | Received/issued dates, valuation, fees and class in an issued-permit feed. Schema and 100 records inspected. | All eligible applications including unresolved, withdrawn and rejected cases; meaning of received date; review milestones and scope matching. No speed statistic calculated from this limited sample. |
| Fort Collins Current Building Permits | Type and current status. Schema and 100 records inspected. | A history with dates and all application outcomes. The prior portal's June 2026 migration makes source continuity a specific maintenance requirement. |
The decision this evidence could support
Whether to test a clearer completeness checklist or a better handoff between review stages for one defined project class.
The current evidence does not identify which process change will help. A stage-by-stage extract would show where the wait actually occurs and distinguish applicant time from agency time.
Compare median and long waits, rework, total cost and quality together. Retain unresolved and withdrawn applications in the cohort.
Proposed next data step
CII research lead and jurisdiction data stewards agree a shared event history for 2025 applications, using de-identified project IDs and a consistent project class.
- Application, completeness, review, resubmission, decision and issue events.
- Scope, size, valuation and complexity; actual fees and rework.
- Current status, closure reason and quality or inspection outcomes where comparable.
Roles are proposed. No partner participation, funding or records request has been agreed or sent.
Explore one direct cost of waiting
Example inputs for a project. Replace them with verified project figures to estimate a financing-cost effect.
Simple arithmetic: capital × annual rate × days ÷ 365. This excludes lost revenue, changing draw schedules and other benefits or costs. It does not estimate statewide GDP or jobs, or establish that a policy will reduce delay.
Audit scope and reproducibility
Boulder query: AppliedDate within calendar 2025 and PermitType = Building Permit - Non-Residential; 207 results, no transfer-limit truncation. The city's data dictionary defines dates and warns that permit numbers may repeat; distinct PermitID was used. The two unissued Tenant Finish records marked Revisions - Resubmit and one marked Void should not be treated as the same outcome.
Denver check: the first 100 permit numbers ordered from records issued in 2025. Fort Collins check: first 100 ordered permit numbers in the current feed. Both are limited schema checks, not representative samples or full censuses. No city league table is supported. Public source snapshots, query URLs and hashes are retained with this work.
Existing tools already report permit activity and some historical timelines, including Igni's Boulder page. This pilot's proposed contribution is a comparable application cohort with stage attribution, cost, quality and follow-up after a specific change. That contribution remains to be demonstrated.
06 / A research agenda that can become useful work
Let the missing evidence guide what CII builds.
Each gap connects a decision to a proposed collection effort. The concepts below are candidates for CII initiatives; owners, participants and resources still need to be agreed.
Make comparison a reason to improve.
Joseph's direction is to encourage participants to get better through a matrix of performance and cost, analogous to AI benchmarks. A useful comparison makes the task, conditions and tradeoffs explicit.
For a company or operating process
- Define the same task, customer outcome and operating conditions.
- Compare quality, total cost, time and reliability.
- Show improvement against the participant's own baseline and suitable peers.
- Use verified practices from stronger performers as hypotheses to test.
For a credible benchmark
- Publish the method, version, coverage and uncertainty.
- Use similar-size, stage and industry groups where relevant.
- Keep quality visible when a faster or cheaper approach looks better.
- Review incentives and refresh test cases when participants learn the benchmark.
No company measurements or rankings are present in this release. A participating-company pilot would need agreed data access, comparable tasks and rules for publication. Geography and industry comparisons in this prototype are descriptive context, not controlled performance tests.