Population losses in several of Colorado’s Western Slope resort counties underscore a growing trend: as housing and cost-of-living pressures mount, more residents are moving out than moving in.

Overall, the state of Colorado continues to experience positive population growth, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s county-level population estimates published on March 26.

From July 2024 to July 2025, the state saw a 0.4% increase in residents, equal to more than 24,000 people. The state also saw more births than deaths — a product of a low death rate offsetting a steadily declining birth rate.

However, the 0.4% increase is significantly less compared to the kind of growth the state saw before 2020, which could signal that Colorado has begun to lose its appeal as a popular destination for movers, according to the Common Sense Institute of Colorado’s analysis of the census estimates. The institute is a think tank that promotes free enterprise policy.

A significant factor behind Colorado’s slowed population growth is a slowdown of domestic migration. While the state’s population growth 10 years ago was primarily driven by people moving to Colorado from other states, the most recent census estimates reveal natural change — births versus deaths — now plays a larger part in maintaining the state’s population.

Census estimates rank the state 48th in the nation for domestic migration as a share of the population and 44th for net migration. Ten years ago, Colorado was third in the nation for domestic migration as a share of population, according to the Common Sense Institute report.

The population gained from net migration into Colorado was 20 times less in 2025 than it was in 2015. In total from July 2024 to July 2025, Colorado gained 3,256 people from net migration compared to 20,608 from births minus deaths. The gain in migration is thanks to the arrival of 15,356 international migrants, which offset the state’s net loss of 12,100 domestic migrants.

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Other factors behind negative net migration have been influenced by national movements, such as slower job growth, higher interest rates and changes in immigration policy, according to a March release from the Colorado State Demography Office.

“At least some portion of the domestic out-migration is made up of recently arrived international migrants (arriving between 2022 and 2024) who have moved to other states as Colorado was not their intended final destination,” the office said in its March release. Counties that received the highest numbers of international migrants were more likely to see net negative domestic migration from their move to other states or counties in 2025.

Western Slope counties see population declines

While several Western Slope counties also share in the state’s domestic migration slowdown, the region’s births, deaths and international migration weren’t enough to save resort towns from a dip in population.

Between 2024 and 2025, counties including Eagle, Pitkin, Summit, Garfield and Grand saw net population losses between 344 and 126 residents. Similarly to statewide trends, rural mountain counties experienced a drop in domestic migration, though natural change was not enough to offset the number of people moving out of the Western Slope.

This is a shift from the cumulative population trends from 2020 to 2025, which show positive population growth for most Western Slope counties with the exception of Eagle and Pitkin counties.

Of the 24 counties that have experienced a population decline since the 2020 Census, Eagle County is among the top three seeing the largest declines with a loss of 1,430 residents since 2020. The other two counties — Jefferson and Boulder counties — both lost over 2,000, a notably lower percentage of their approximately 580,400 and 328,500 populations, respectively.

Pitkin, though having lost a smaller quantity of residents since 2020, saw a larger percentage decrease of its overall population — around 4.2%. 

While births continue to outpace deaths for most of rural western Colorado, domestic migration paints a significantly different picture. Out of the state’s 64 counties, 30 saw negative domestic migration, including several Western Slope counties housing resort ski towns.

‘High housing cost counties’ drive out-migration

The impacts of housing opportunities on Grand County’s population mirror broader trends seen across the mountain region. According to the State Demography Office, a significant portion of counties that lost populations to other states or counties in 2025 were considered “high housing cost counties.”

The State Demography Office specifically identified Eagle, Pitkin, and Summit counties as areas with higher housing costs that experienced net negative domestic migration.

Pitkin County Commissioner Jeffrey Woodruff said a combination of higher interest rates from international conflict, higher construction costs far exceeding county budgets, and higher shipping costs and tariffs for materials have all weighed on construction budgets.

“This county continues to be both an attractive place to work and live; to recreate and enjoy year round cultural activities. But headwinds include cost of living in the mountains, with construction costs, regional healthcare costs and homeowners insurance adding to financial burden and acting as a net migration constraint,” Woodruff wrote in an email. Pitkin County’s 2024 cost of living is over 120% of the national average and is 95% higher than the rest of the state, he added.

On the other hand, many of the counties with the strongest positive net migration in the state were also those that saw some of the largest increases in residential construction. These include Weld (1.9% increase), Douglas (1.6%) and Larimer (0.8%) counties.

Grand County was one of the few Western Slope counties to see gains in population between July 2024 and July 2025, which Grand County Commissioner Randy George credits partially to an increase in housing projects.

“If you look at it over several years, at least five years, the population of Grand County has been relatively stable. … Although there’s been a lot of building,” George said. “What that means is there are a lot of people that have built second homes, or have built homes that they’re using for short-term rentals.”

A growing number of retirees aging in place and the county’s proximity to the metro area has likely also contributed to positive domestic migration, in addition to a lower cost for homes compared to neighboring ski towns.

“Just like a lot of places, there was a big bump during COVID, when people all of a sudden said, ‘Wait a minute, I don’t want to be in the metro area, I’ll build a place,’” he said. “It has abated some, but people continue to build up here.”

For rural towns like those in Eagle and Pitkin counties, factors like mountain terrain and zoning regulation can limit where cities are able to build and expand. For Grand County, space is less of an obstacle.

“We are grand. It’s in the name,” George said. “We are not hemmed in that way, there is still a fair amount of space available.”

Hoping to make housing more accessible, Woodruff said Pitkin County issued $323 million in permits in 2025. A number of employee housing developments are currently under construction, in addition to projects stemming from ongoing partnerships with the West Mountain Regional Housing Coalition on deed restricted units.

Cost of living, business challenges

Aside from housing, one of the biggest challenges faced by mountain resort towns is cost of living, which has been met with departure from both families and businesses. An April report from the Colorado Chamber Foundation found that 98 companies relocated or moved business operations to other states since 2019, taking jobs with them. The companies blamed excessive business regulations and high costs for their decision.

“As you can guess, it’s a cost of living challenge that’s driving a change in our demographics here,” said Erin McCuskey, economic resiliency manager for Eagle County. “I think it’s also meaningful to mention that these … demographic shifts are happening nationally, at least in terms of workforce. We have long predicted that our number of active workers was going to start to decrease as we have so many people aging out of the workforce and moving into retirement.”

The outflow of domestic migration and lower birth rates have only exacerbated these workforce challenges, especially with some sectors already struggling to hire in rural areas. The Common Sense Institute report said the combination of lower birth rates and a domestic migration slowdown could potentially compound an already-occurring loss of economic activity. 

“Policymakers should consider how to avoid a situation in which the two trends feed into each other: businesses leave as fewer skilled and educated workers are available, and fewer people move from other states as high-paying jobs become scarcer,” the report said.

In order to combat these challenges, McCuskey said the Eagle County government launched its Workforce Pipelines and Ecosystem Mapping at the start of 2026 with the goal of expanding access to career pathways and strengthening partnerships with local employers and workforce organizations.

“Our focus is really on retention initiatives,” McCuskey said. “Since it is hard for us to relocate workers to our area due to the cost of living challenges and just the lack of housing, we really want to make sure that the people who are here that love being a part of our community can see the great career opportunities that are available to them.”

Eagle County is also host to the Northwest Colorado Small Business Development Center, which works with 11 counties on various business support initiatives. The center has advisors who, for no cost, work with businesses to figure out succession plans and protect their assets.

“We’re really trying to change the narrative that employers are competing for talent with the business that’s across the street from them, or that we’re competing between our communities for workforce,” McCuskey. “In reality, we in Colorado are competing with other states for our workforce.”

On Monday, the Colorado Senate Judiciary Committee passed HB26-1322, a bill that creates a private civil right of action allowing survivors of conversion therapy to sue the practitioners who subjected them to it. The bill, which has no statute of limitations for such claims, would likely make the practice of conversion therapy financially prohibitive in the state. It comes in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 8-1 decision last month in Chiles v. Salazar, which found that Colorado’s 2019 ban on conversion therapy unconstitutional—effectively legalizing the discredited practice nationwide. The new bill has one final legislative hurdle to clear—the full Colorado Senate—before heading to Governor Jared Polis’s desk, though the governor has so far offered only lukewarm signals about whether he will sign it, saying he is “hopeful there is still time to construct a framework he could support.”

The bill targets what it calls “sexual orientation or gender identity change efforts”—defined as “any practice by a licensed mental health professional that seeks to direct a patient toward a predetermined sexual orientation or gender identity outcome, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of a particular sex or gender, regardless of the sexual orientation or gender identity the patient is directed toward.” The inclusion of “eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions” is notable—conversion therapists have long used this framework to argue disingenuously that they are not trying to change a person’s sexual orientation, merely helping them manage unwanted feelings. The bill explicitly carves out any counseling or therapy that “provides acceptance, support, and understanding of a patient” or “facilitates a patient’s coping, social support, and identity exploration and development”—meaning therapists who support a patient’s own process of self-discovery, without steering them toward a predetermined outcome, would face no liability.

The bill uses a novel legal mechanism to target conversion therapy—a private right of action. Rather than the government banning conversion therapy outright, which is what the Supreme Court struck down in Chiles, the bill instead allows survivors to sue their practitioners directly, stating that “a person who suffered an injury as a result of sexual orientation or gender identity change efforts may bring a civil action for damages” against their conversion therapist. It also states that a lawsuit to recover damages can be commenced “at any time without limitation,” making its statute of limitations effectively endless. The mechanism may be insulated from the constitutional problem the Supreme Court identified in Chiles because the government is not restricting speech—instead, private citizens are seeking civil remedies for harm they suffered, the same way a patient can sue a doctor for malpractice. As Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School, told Erin in the Morning after the Chiles ruling, “While the Supreme Court decision limits the abilities of states to regulate conversion therapy through professional standards, they did not limit the ability for states to protect LGBTQ youth from these abusive practices through tort or malpractice law.”

If the mechanism sounds familiar, it is because Republicans pioneered it to get around Supreme Court rulings they didn’t like—most famously in Texas’s SB 8, the 2021 abortion “bounty hunter” law. That law banned abortion after six weeks not through government enforcement but by allowing any private citizen to sue anyone who performed or aided an abortion for $10,000 in damages. The legal trick was simple: when abortion providers tried to challenge SB 8 in court, they couldn’t get an injunction because there was no government official to enjoin. Courts found that you can’t sue “the state” to block a law that only private citizens enforce. The Supreme Court effectively let SB 8 stand, and the strategy worked—abortion access in Texas collapsed virtually overnight even while Roe v. Wade was still the law of the land. Kansas used the same model in SB 244, which allows anyone to sue a transgender person for using a restroom that doesn’t match their assigned sex at birth. Now, Colorado Democrats are exploiting the same constitutional loophole in the opposite direction—using private civil enforcement to deter a harmful practice that the Supreme Court says the government cannot directly ban.

It is important to note that some have raised concerns the bill could be weaponized against gender-affirming therapists—with anti-trans groups arguing that helping a trans youth transition constitutes its own form of “conversion therapy.” But the bill contains multiple layers of protection against such misuse. Its carveouts explicitly shield counseling that provides “acceptance, support, and understanding of a patient.” The bill also has protections in its causation standard. To establish that conversion therapy caused harm, a court must weigh “the nature, duration, and intensity” of the efforts, “the age and vulnerability of the plaintiff at the time,” “the relationship between the plaintiff and the mental health professional,” and “expert testimony regarding the general psychological effects of sexual orientation or gender identity change efforts.” It is unlikely that judges will consider anti-trans activists to be considered medical “experts” on this topic.

LGBTQ+ organizations, activists, and Democratic lawmakers in the state have supported the bill’s passage. “This decision only reinforces the urgent need for state-level protections,” said One Colorado, the state’s largest LGBTQ+ advocacy organization. “[HB 1322] provides a pathway for accountability, allowing survivors to seek justice against those who administer this harmful practice. We remain committed to ensuring that those responsible for such profound damage are held accountable.” Rep. Karen McCormick, a Democrat from Longmont, was blunt about the bill’s intent: “The purpose of this bill is seriously to send a chilling effect to any licensed professional therapist who may think about bringing that practice back.”

Conversion therapy is a discredited practice broadly decried by every major American medical organization. The APA concluded in a 2009 systematic review that the practice is “unlikely to be successful and involves risk of harm, including depression, suicidality, and anxiety,” and called for its total elimination. The United Nations has deemed conversion therapy a form of torture. A 2020 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that LGBTQ+ youth subjected to conversion therapy were more than twice as likely to report attempting suicide. For transgender people specifically, conversion therapy often takes the form of so-called “gender exploratory therapy,” a rebranded approach that seeks to convince trans youth they are not actually transgender, keeping transition just out of reach by tricking trans youth that it might be offered if they jump through endless hoops while intending to deny it the entire way.

The bill now heads to the full Colorado Senate for a floor vote, where Democrats hold a 23-12 majority and passage is expected. Coloradans who support the bill can contact their state senator through the Colorado General Assembly’s legislator lookup tool. If the Senate passes the bill, it will go to Governor Polis, whose signature remains the final and most uncertain step. Polis, the first openly gay governor elected in the United States, signed the original 2019 conversion therapy ban and has called the practice “a scam and a waste of people’s hard-earned money”—but his office has stopped short of committing to sign this bill, saying only that he is “hopeful there is still time to construct a framework he could support.” What changes, if any, the governor is seeking remain unclear. The bill includes a safety clause that would make it take effect on July 1, 2026, and would exempt it from voter referendum. If signed, Colorado would become the first state in the country to use a private right of action to combat conversion therapy in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling.