Colorado MCA debt relief companies, ranked on what settlement costs2026 rankings, priced in cents on the dollar

What it costs to settle a merchant cash advance in Colorado

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A funder never quotes you a price. It quotes a payback. Fifty thousand wired, sixty-eight thousand owed, taken at roughly $680 every business day until the number is gone. The price is decided later, in a negotiation you have not started yet, and it is quoted in cents.

This page ranks three firms on that single question. What does the file close at, and what does the firm charge you on top of it. Colorado hands you an argument that most guides written in New York never mention, and it also hides a hatch that can take the argument away. Both change your price.

What Colorado advances actually settle for

Between 40 and 55 cents on the dollar is the working band for a Colorado file. Call it 47 cents in the middle. On an $80,000 payback that is $37,600 paid and $42,400 gone.

Stacked books close lower per dollar, not higher. Three funders in line all know the merchant cannot pay all three. The second and third positions are the ones that move, because they are the ones with nothing behind them if the business folds. Order of negotiation is a pricing decision, not a scheduling one.

Speed is also price. An attorney-led firm closes a single advance in two to eight weeks. A consumer program quotes 24 to 48 months because it waits for an escrow balance to build before it opens a conversation. Two years of daily debits at $680 is $340,000 out the door. Nothing settled in month 30 is worth what it would have been worth in month two.

Why 45 percent sets the price of a Colorado settlement

C.R.S. 5-12-103(1) lets parties to any note or other instrument of writing stipulate for more than eight percent per year, but not more than forty-five. Subsection (2) then defines interest as the sum of all charges payable directly or indirectly by the debtor and imposed directly or indirectly by the lender as a condition of the credit. Origination fee. ACH fee. Underwriting fee. Every line on the funding statement counts toward the forty-five.

C.R.S. 18-15-104(1) puts a felony behind the same number. Knowingly charging, taking or receiving a loan finance charge above a 45 percent annual rate is criminal usury, a class 6 felony. And 18-15-101(6)(a)(I) defines loan finance charge to include any amount payable under a point, discount, or other system of charges, however denominated. A factor rate is a discount. The statute named the mechanism in 1972.

Read what Colorado did not write. No dollar threshold. No corporate exemption. No sentence stripping the borrower or a guarantor of the defense. In 1981, when Congress offered states preemption of rate ceilings on business loans, C.R.S. 5-13-102 answered on the record that Colorado does not want section 511 of that act to apply here. That refusal is the reason a Colorado funder prices a settlement differently than the same funder prices a file in Alabama.

Check C.R.S. 5-12-107 before you check anything else

There is one way out of the ceiling and the funder's lawyers know it. A commercial credit plan is exempt from the civil cap under 5-12-103(5). Its fees are declared to be interest that the 45 percent limit expressly does not reach, 5-12-107(7) lifts the plan out of every other Colorado law limiting rates or charges, and 18-15-104(4)(d) lifts those same fees out of the felony. That is the whole loophole, in one section.

So read the definition word by word. C.R.S. 5-12-107(8)(b) requires an account under which the merchant may from time to time make purchases on credit or obtain loans. From time to time. An account. One wire at closing, one fixed payback and one payoff is none of those things. If the funder never built a revolving facility, it does not get 5-12-107, and it is standing inside a 45 percent ceiling with a class 6 felony behind it.

This is the first page of the file to open, and it moves the number. A funder holding a genuine revolving plan settles at the top of the band. A funder holding a single-draw advance dressed as a plan settles at the bottom.

The percentage matters less than what it is charged on

Fees across the category run 15 to 25 percent. That range tells you almost nothing on its own. What it is multiplied by tells you everything.

Take the $80,000 payback closing at 47 cents, so $37,600 paid. A firm charging 20 percent of enrolled debt bills $16,000. A firm charging 20 percent of the settled amount bills $7,520. Same headline rate, and the second firm costs $8,480 less on an identical result.

1. What is the basis. Enrolled debt, or the amount actually settled. Get it in writing before you sign anything.
2. When is it billed. Delancey Street charges a percentage of enrolled debt. Freedom charges 15 to 25 percent of enrolled debt plus $9.95 a month while the file sits.
3. Is there a minimum. Freedom starts at $7,500 of enrolled debt, Pacific at $10,000. A single $22,000 advance can be too small for a program and still be worth settling.
4. What is the monthly. An administrative or escrow charge running for 36 months is a real number. Add it up across the quoted term before you compare anything.

The daily debit is the meter, and it never stops running

Price the delay, because the delay has a price. At $680 a business day, one month of hesitation is about $14,280 pulled from the operating account. Two months is $28,560. That is money spent at 100 cents on the dollar to postpone a conversation that would have closed the balance at 47.

Then there is the second advance. The most expensive decision in a Colorado MCA file is almost never the first advance. It is the one taken three months later to cover the first, at a worse factor rate, from a funder that already knew the first position existed. Stacking is what converts a survivable balance into a book that needs negotiating.

A funder is also running a clock of its own. C.R.S. 13-80-103.5(1)(a) gives it six years to sue on a liquidated debt under a written funding agreement. Your own breach claim, if the damages are not determinable, sits at three years under 13-80-101(1)(a), and fraud and misrepresentation sit at three as well. Your clock is shorter than theirs.

The file that gets you a real quote

No firm can price your case from a phone call. It can price it from paper. Six items answer the question.

1. Every funding agreement, including the ones you signed on a phone screen at a broker's prompting.
2. Ninety days of bank statements showing each debit, with the funder names as they appear on the ACH descriptor.
3. Any default notice, acceleration letter or demand from a collection agency or funder's counsel.
4. A UCC search on your entity at the Colorado Secretary of State, so you know how many blanket filings exist and who filed first.
5. The reconciliation clause from each agreement, plus any request you sent to adjust the draw and whatever answer came back.
6. Whether a confession of judgment was signed, and whether a judgment from another state has already been filed against you here.

That last one has a ten day fuse. Under C.R.S. 13-53-104(3), no execution issues on a foreign judgment filed here until ten days after filing. Ten days is the entire window to get in front of the court, and most merchants assume they have sixty.