Costa Rica · Tax regime
Costa Rican Territorial Tax System
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Last verified July 2026
Territorial under Ley 7092 art. 1. Costa Rica was fully removed from the EU's lists on 18 February 2025 — note that many tax-firm posts date this to February 2024, which is wrong.
Costa Rica offers territorial taxation without Panama's EU blacklisting — it went Annex II in Feb 2022, Annex I in Feb 2023, back to Annex II in Oct 2023, and was removed entirely on 18 February 2025. For a family that wants a territorial base and clean EU banking, that clean record is the whole argument.
Qualifying routes
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Tax residency
generally more than 183 days in a tax year
The facts
- Total landed cost
- no direct cost; CCSS affiliation is the recurring charge
- Timeline
- 1–6 months — obtaining a residency certificate requires substantiation
- Physical presence
- 183+ days
- Family
- individual
- Permanent residency
- not applicable
- Citizenship
- not applicable
- Language test
- not applicable
- Dual citizenship
- Permitted
- Requirements
- 183+ days of presencetax registration and CCSS affiliationgenuine foreign-source characterisation of income
What can go wrong
- Ley 10.381 imposes 15% on foreign passive income of non-qualified entities in multinational groups. Art. 2 quater's 'dos o más personas jurídicas' means individuals are not caught — but if your foreign income runs through a Costa Rican company inside a group structure, model this carefully.
- The impuesto solidario on luxury homes above roughly CRC 143 million is not a wealth tax but functions as one for a family buying a trophy property.
- CCSS affiliation is compulsory for residents and assessed on declared worldwide income in practice, which is an odd fit with a territorial system and catches people by surprise.
- Territoriality is narrower in practice than in theory: income earned by your own labour while physically in Costa Rica is Costa Rican-source regardless of who pays it or where.
- Costa Rica has been a CRS participant since 2018.