Costa Rica's Digital-Nomad Visa: How the Tax Exemption Works

Most digital-nomad visas leave your tax position to the general residency rules of the country you move to. Costa Rica’s remote-worker status is different: the tax treatment is written into the law that created it, and it carries one limit that is easy to miss.

What the law actually exempts

Costa Rica’s nomad status, the Estancia para Trabajador o Prestador Remoto de Servicios, comes from Ley N.º 10008 (2021), implemented by Reglamento 43619, which has been in force since 8 July 2022. Under that framework, beneficiaries are not treated as Costa Rican tax residents while the status is valid, and foreign-source income is fully exempt from income tax.

That treatment is set by statute rather than by counting days. There is no day-count threshold that triggers tax residence for this status, so the exemption is not the usual “stay under X days and you stay non-resident” arrangement — it flows from holding the status itself. The status is granted for an initial 12 months, is renewable, and runs to a maximum total stay of 24 months. The second year is conditioned on having stayed at least 180 days during the first.

The income that qualifies is income earned remotely for a foreign person or entity. The status does not let you work for the local market: serving local clients is not allowed. So the income that is exempt is, by design, the same foreign-source income the visa is built around.

The catch: principal beneficiary only

The exemption applies to the principal beneficiary only. Costa Rica lets you include dependents — and including them raises the minimum income requirement from USD 3,000 a month (about EUR 2,760) to USD 4,000 a month (about EUR 3,680), with the higher figure covering the whole family. But the law is explicit that the foreign-income exemption covers the principal applicant, not the family members added to the application.

In practice that means a dependent who also earns foreign income should not assume the same statutory exemption automatically extends to them. The law does not spell out how a dependent’s own earnings are treated, so that is a question to settle with a Costa Rican tax adviser before relying on it.

What this does not decide

The exemption is about Costa Rican income tax on foreign-source income. It says nothing about what your home country or your tax-residence country may still tax. The exemption covers Costa Rica’s side only; your obligations elsewhere are separate and unchanged by this status.

A few practical figures sit alongside the tax position. The application fee is about EUR 92, applications can be filed online or at an embassy, and processing runs roughly two to three weeks. Health insurance is explicitly required: a medical policy covering Costa Rica for at least USD 50,000 (about EUR 46,000), valid for the full stay, with each family member needing their own policy. The status offers no path to permanent residence or citizenship.

These details were last verified on 15 June 2026 against Costa Rica’s Dirección General de Migración and the published texts of Ley 10008 and Reglamento 43619. If you are weighing the visa mainly for its tax treatment, the line to hold onto is narrow but clear: the statutory exemption is the principal beneficiary’s, not the household’s.