Colorado’s high country towns are cutting budgets after a slow winter pinched critical sales tax revenue.
Spending in 18 Colorado mountain towns fell in the winter of 2025-26, reaching a four-year low. It’s the second winter in a row that the 18 communities have seen wintertime declines in net taxable sales tracked by the state. The decline in spending is a national trend, but in communities that rely heavily on sales tax revenue, even small dips in taxable revenue can have large impacts.
It could have been much worse. The small slowdown in spending does not compare to the historic drop in visitation in 2025-26, which saw Colorado’s ski resorts host the lowest number of visitors since the early 1990s. That disparity between spending and visits reflects a resiliency in mountain towns that are weaning themselves from a long history of dependency on tourists. That weaning includes support for a growing population of remote workers and transitioning from a tourism economy to an amenity economy.
“Last year would have been an earthquake a decade ago,” said Ian Billick, the mayor of Crested Butte, which saw a mere 3.4% decline in spending for the six-month 2025-26 winter, when snowfall at Crested Butte Mountain Resort measured only 60% of average. “But financially, for the town, it was barely a speed bump. I think there’s a lot less panic around this.”
The Colorado Sun tracks winter and summer taxable sales in 18 large and small mountain towns near ski areas. The November-through-April stretch of the 2025-26 winter saw $4.8 billion in spending, down from $5 billion the previous winter and $5.1 billion in 2023-24. Only two communities posted slight annual increases in winter spending — Durango and Glenwood Springs — while the annual declines ranged from 18.7% in Mountain Village to 2.6% in Aspen.
The state’s ski areas reported a 24% collapse in visitation for the 2025-26 season, ending a four-year stretch of record-setting traffic, with 10.5 million visits marking the least trafficked season since 1991-92. Vail Resorts, which accounts for more than a third of all ski traffic in Colorado, reported a 25% decline at its Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Crested Butte, Keystone and Vail ski areas as well as its Park City Mountain Resort in Utah.
The National Ski Areas Association reported 20.1 million visits to its six-state Rocky Mountain Region in 2025-26, down 24% from the previous season. Vail Resorts, the largest ski area operator in North America with 37 ski areas in the U.S. and Canada, reported only a 5.6% decline in lift ticket revenue for the 2025-26 season, affirming its strategy of shifting the uncertainty around snowfall onto the shoulders of skiers who buy tickets and passes months before the snow flies.
Could Colorado’s mountain towns be taking a page from Vail Resorts playbook and limiting exposure to bad snow years?
Spending in the towns closest to Vail Resorts’ Colorado ski areas fell only slightly, compared with the collapse in visits. Spending was down 13.9% in Avon outside Beaver Creek, down 8.3% in the town of Breckenridge, down 2.7% in Silverthorne near Keystone, down 6.3% in Mount Crested Butte, and down 7% in Vail.
The declines in spending in mountain towns means many local governments that depend on sales taxes are cinching their belts, cutting budgets and bracing for more challenges as municipal costs soar amid declining revenues.
In the last couple years, for example, the cost of installing new sewer, water and pedestrian infrastructure has increased five-fold in Crested Butte. The price tag for wastewater improvements has nearly tripled. The town has frozen hiring, scaled back capital improvements and directed more funds toward skyrocketing health insurance costs, which account for 15% of the town’s general fund.
The long-term financial planning is helping the town weather the slight downturn in sales tax revenue.
“I think there’s a lot less panic around this than if it had happened 10 years ago,” Billick said.
Brian Lewandowski, an economist who heads business research at CU Boulder’s Leeds School of Business, often travels the state presenting his curated data to Colorado’s rural communities. Resorts towns are facing a litany of shifting challenges around the climate, workforce, cost of living and tourism trends like the steep drop in international visitors. While those towns have diversified their economies in recent years, tourism remains “the tail that wags the dog,” for mountain towns, Lewandowski said.
Lewandowski describes the growing population of work-from-homers in mountain towns as both a strength and opportunity with higher-income residents helping to stabilize local economies but they are also a threat if they are ever called back into the office and forced to move.
Still, overarching tourism trends like a flattening of overnight traffic into Colorado and reduced visitor spending remain critical hurdles in mountain town economies where even slight upticks and downturns resonate through all corners.
“During good times, it’s really good. But the reverse is also true,” he said. “”Unfortunately it really takes a crisis for action to happen and that’s what a lot of these rural Colorado communities are facing right now … as they see they need to be more than just an agricultural economy, or an energy economy or even a tourism economy. It’s not about replacing the native industry as much as growing around that industry.”