Eric Escudero prefers to stay apolitical, especially when it comes to contentious political issues like a proposal to pay tipped workers in Denver the same minimum wage statewide, which would effectively lower the city’s current tipped pay by $4 an hour.
Just don’t misinterpret his data.
As the communications director for Denver’s Excise and Licenses department, his agency issues licenses to restaurants that pass safety inspections. But “retail food” licenses are also issued to food trucks, convenience stores like 7-Eleven, stadium hot dog vendors and more. Not all are restaurants. And not all “active” licenses mean a restaurant is still in business.
One cut of the data shows a decline in what are likely restaurants. Another shows an increase. Both are flawed, Escudero said. But some used the data to support House Bill 1208 to let restaurants count a larger amount of a worker’s tips to offset base wages in places where the minimum wage is higher than the state. Others used it to show the fast rise of Denver’s minimum wage isn’t solely to blame for a large number of restaurant closures.
The point is, he said, “There is no such thing as a restaurant license in Denver.”
So what does the city’s licensing data mean? We break it down here, as well as data from other sources that provide some measure of how restaurants are surviving or failing in Colorado.
Denver’s licenses: Unclear
While older data from the city’s Excise and Licensing department shows that the number of retail food licenses grew between 2021 and 2023, the whole system was overhauled last year. That means it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison — and more like a Cara Cara oranges-to-oranges comparison.
Starting in 2025, the agency began asking applicants, “Is your business considered a restaurant?” as part of the license system overhaul.
In other words, Escudero said, Denver now asks applicants to self-identify as a restaurant.
The best comparison he can offer is that there are currently 1,780 active licenses, compared with 2,356 in July 2023. That’s a 24.4% decline, or a loss of 576 businesses.
But again, the data sets aren’t perfectly aligned.
The 2025 numbers are businesses that confirmed they are a restaurant.
The 2023 data is “our closest estimation of what would constitute a ‘restaurant,’” he said. It excludes festival food stands or food trucks, but does include stadium hot dog vendors, 7-Eleven and McDonald’s. The 2024 data is no good because of the system overhaul.
In either case, licenses last for 15 months so some “active” licenses could include shuttered restaurants. The number of shuttered restaurants could be even higher.
“Excise and Licenses does not recommend using license data to draw conclusions about the health of the restaurant industry because licensing does not necessarily reflect whether a business is failing or thriving or if they are even operating,” Escudero said.
Denver sales-tax data
Restaurants in the city of Denver were flying high before the pandemic, but by 2021, the more than 2,600 “unique restaurant sales tax filers” dropped by 250, at least in terms of those that actually filed taxes, according to the latest data from the city of Denver’s Department of Finance.
Two years later, however, the city added back 238 for a total of 2,593 restaurant-related tax filers at the end of 2023. That year, restaurants contributed $130.8 million in sales tax to the city. There were 12 more restaurants than in 2019, when restaurants contributed $110.9 million.
Data for 2024 should be available in early April, said Joshua Rosenblum, a spokesman for the department. And the city does “expect a slight increase in collections and number of restaurant tax filers from 2023,” he said.
By “restaurants,” the city’s finance office uses the North American Industry Classification System, code 722. That includes a lot of different types of “Food services and Drinking Places,” such as bars, food trucks, catering services and full-service restaurants.
Another caveat, Rosenblum said, “it encompasses how the business self-reported their own NAICS.”
Colorado sales tax data
Last year, more restaurants than ever filed sales tax returns in Colorado, an estimated 15,865, according to the state’s Department of Revenue. Some months were higher, some lower, depending on whether a business collected sales tax from customers.
This data is based on the NAICS code of 722, so it counts not just full-service restaurants but also limited-service restaurants, bars, caterers, etc. The state began extracting the number of retailers in July 2020 in the pandemic. Amber Egbert, the revenue department’s research and legislative services director, said the better measure for this story was returns because if a business like McDonald’s has 12 locations, it counts as one retailer but 12 returns.
Based on available public data since 2016, Colorado’s highest monthly returns were in September, when 17,911 food and drink-related establishments filed returns.
That’s a big jump from the pandemic low of 13,741 in 2020.
But Colorado had been above 17,000 before. That was in 2018, a year after Amendment 70 went into effect to increase the state minimum wage faster than inflation. The minimum wage increased 90-cents that year to $10.20 an hour.
In 2019, returns plummeted to 14,524 in September. The pandemic hit the year after that and restaurant-related returns fell 15.7% to 14,524.
“Somewhere between 10 to 20% of the overall (retailer) population is either rolling on to the sales tax or rolling off just because of business churn,” Egbert said. “So year over year, as much as 20% of the filings are new and as much as 20% of the businesses are closing. It’s usually closer to the 10% number.”
The state breaks down industry retail sales by county and certain cities, but it doesn’t share how many returns or restaurants are in a county, at least for the food and drink category (“Some of those categories would get so small, they’re not releasable by us” for privacy reasons, she said).
We’ve compiled all the data on food and drink businesses in the larger counties to show comparisons of how restaurant-related businesses are doing by region based on retail sales.
Federal data: Bureau of Labor Statistics
A oft-used source called the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages takes a census of employers each quarter about jobs and wages.
That gives us a good idea of how many restaurants exist in Denver and Colorado and how many workers those businesses employ. Here’s what that looked like as of third-quarter 2024:
The data’s considered high quality because between 85% and 95% of the state’s employers share their numbers each quarter, according to QCEW’s reporting rates. Employers must fill out the survey for unemployment insurance.
The quarterly data ”basically serves as the universe/census for most labor market data (and really that is through employers submitting that data each quarter for unemployment insurance purposes, so the two are intertwined),” Denver economist Ryan Gedney said in an email. It’s more granular if you want to know about industries and wages, though the most recent data often gets revised. His perspective is to “proceed cautiously when trying to interpret recent Colorado establishment data as economic trends.”
The latest numbers for Denver do show that the number of full-service restaurants were on the rise before the pandemic. After the dip in 2020, numbers started growing again to 910 in early 2023, only to lose momentum and drop to 827 by the third quarter last year. Limited-service restaurants that would count fast casual eateries with few servers have fallen since last March but are overall higher than in 2019.
Restaurant workers are a more exaggerated trend. The number of workers fell dramatically in the pandemic, growing during the recovery until the end of 2022. Since then, full-service staffing has seen ups and downs and never recovered to 2019 levels. But the number of limited-service restaurant workers did recover, and then some.
Weekly wages, on the other hand, have continued to increase since 2019.
Colorado Restaurant Association members
The statewide restaurant association has 5,000 member locations around the state. But it’s kind of an unofficial count since not all pay membership dues.
Large restaurant chains that are part of the National Restaurant Association count as members of the Colorado organization “if they have local locations” here, said Denise Mickelsen, spokesperson for CRA, but “They do not pay us dues, they pay dues to the NRA.”
That said, it’s more challenging to find historic data on how many “members” CRA had years ago. However, Mickelsen shared these official numbers:
- In 2024, 38 members dropped out due to lack of funds, while 99 dropped out because they went out of business.
- In 2023, 16 dropped out due to lack of funds and 62 went out of business.
Yelp.com: Growth in new restaurants since 2019
According to review site Yelp.com, there has been an increase in new restaurants in Denver every year since the pandemic disruption in 2020.
Yelp’s data science team tracks this number anytime someone creates a new business and it is verified as an active restaurant. One caveat is its data isn’t just the city of Denver. It is the entire Denver-Aurora-Lakewood metro area, a common U.S. Census Bureau standard many economists use to measure local data (including Denver inflation).
Yelp also won’t share how many restaurant closures it has documented, a spokesperson said. That’s a difficult question to answer because they can be hard to find since Yelp removes shuttered companies from its search. But you can search for a specific restaurant that has closed.
In a report last June, the company found that the number of new restaurants in the U.S. had slowed. There was still some growth, at just 6% (between May 2023 to April 2024) compared to 10% a year earlier.