Updated August 30, 2026. This article was originally published in March 2024, when the reform described below had passed only its first reading. It has been rewritten to reflect the law as enacted.
If you are driving in Costa Rica on a license from home, the rule you have probably read online is out of date. You are not capped at three months anymore. You can drive for exactly as long as the immigration officer wrote in your passport, and for many visitors that is now up to 180 days.
That changed in May 2024, when a reform to Article 91 of the Traffic Law took effect. Lawmakers gave it final approval on April 2 of that year, and it became enforceable when it appeared in the official gazette La Gaceta on May 7. More than two years later, a striking amount of the guidance circulating online still describes the old system.
The practical takeaway is simple. Look at the entry stamp in your passport. The date written there is your driving deadline. Costa Rica raised the maximum tourist stay to 180 days in September 2023, but that maximum is not automatic. The officer at the airport decides how long to grant you, and plenty of visitors still receive 90 days or less. Your ability to drive runs exactly as long as your permitted stay, and not a day longer.
The reform also settled something the old law left murky, and it matters if you are planning to rent anything on two wheels. With a foreign license equivalent to Costa Rica’s B-1 class or higher, which for most visitors means an ordinary car license, you may ride motorcycles and mopeds up to 125 cc, and only on secondary roads rather than primary highways. If the machine is electric or hybrid, the ceiling is 11 kilowatts, roughly 15 horsepower. Trikes and quads are permitted up to 500 cc. Anything larger requires the matching license class.
For foreign residents the change is bigger. Under the old rule, you had to prove three months and one day of unbroken presence in the country before you could convert your foreign license to a Costa Rican one. A single weekend trip across the border reset the clock, which left frequent travelers and executives stuck indefinitely. That requirement is gone.
You can now begin the conversion as soon as you hold approved immigration status or have filed an application. That second part is the one people miss. You do not have to wait for your residency to be granted. If your paperwork is with immigration and still pending, you qualify. The same holds if you have applied to change categories or extend your status while a decision is outstanding. Diplomatic and consular staff and officials of international organizations are covered as well.
You still need a valid, undamaged foreign license, a current medical certificate, and proof of where you stand with immigration. You are exempt from the basic road safety course and the practical driving test, which is why converting is considerably easier than starting from zero.
The conversion is handled in person at the Directorate General of Road Education, by appointment only, and the slots go fast. Officials noted in November 2025 that of 16,442 appointments opened between January and September that year, about 3,000, or 18 percent, were lost to no-shows or incomplete paperwork. Bring an official translation of your license, a certification of it, your medical certificate, your passport or home-country identification, and confirmation that you have no unpaid traffic fines.
Once your file is approved, the license itself is printed at Banco de Costa Rica rather than at the road education office. You have six months from approval to arrange the printing. A first converted license is valid for three years.
It is worth checking rather than assuming. Your entry stamp now does double duty, setting both how long you can stay and how long you can legally drive. And if you are settling in for more than a season, there is no longer any reason to wait three months before starting the paperwork.
