If you are planning to ship a vehicle into Costa Rica, two things have changed and both affect what you will pay. Under and Executive import taxes on a vehicle are now calculated using whichever figure is higher — the value on your commercial invoice, including freight and insurance, or the value the Finance Ministry holds on file for an identical vehicle.
If the ministry’s number is higher than yours, you pay on the ministry’s number. This is the verification mechanism vehicle importers had spent most of a year asking the ministry to restore. The second change is a hard cap. If you are not registered as a taxpayer in the business of selling vehicles, you can bring in one vehicle per year. Anyone wanting to import more than that has to register the corresponding economic activity first, which the ministry has framed as a push toward formality in the sector.
The practical effect is that the price on your paperwork no longer sets your tax bill on its own. Before you commit to shipping, look up what the ministry has your make, model and year valued at, because that figure is now the floor. The ministry runs a public lookup called AutoValor for exactly this purpose, and the Tax Directorate administers and updates the underlying list.
If your vehicle does not appear on that list, the burden shifts to you. You will need to supply technical information that lets customs establish a value objectively, so build extra time into your timeline if you are importing something older, unusual or heavily modified. The ministry has not announced a transition period for vehicles already in transit. If yours is on the water or sitting at a port, ask your customs broker which valuation rule will apply to your declaration before it is filed rather than after.
The reason the rules tightened is a gap that opened in 2024. After the passage of Law 10.390, the Executive repealed the decrees that required vehicles to be taxed against a table of minimum values, and then-Finance Minister Nogui Acosta Jaén signed a directive ending the use of tax classification for vehicle imports. From that point, importers declared a vehicle’s value by sworn statement, and collection of vehicle import taxes fell roughly 16%.
One case shows the scale as a 2025 BMW X6 M came through SantamarÃa customs from the United States in June of last year on an invoice of $6,000. With freight and insurance, the value used to calculate tax reached $7,367, and the importer paid $3,541, mostly in sales tax and selective consumption tax. The same model sells for about $130,000 in the United States and from $195,000 in Costa Rica. Valued at the US price, the tax bill would have been about $62,400, or roughly sixteen times what was paid.
Hacienda and vehicle importers have documented similar gaps across a range of luxury models, including cases the ministry has linked to money laundering rather than simple tax avoidance. The Finance Ministry puts the revenue lost to undervaluation at around â‚¡20 billion, or roughly $44 million at the Central Bank reference rate of â‚¡451.72 per dollar on Sept. 2. In its own framing, that is more than 2,000 housing bonds for low-income families at â‚¡9.7 million each.
Revenue Vice Minister VÃctor Carvajal said the decree closes gaps that had been left open to benefit a small number of people, and that the goal is fairer competition in the market and better tax collection. A separate measure is moving through the Legislative Assembly would let the ministry correct a vehicle’s fiscal value when it finds significant gaps against the average market value of comparable vehicles.
The ministry estimates that change would add â‚¡2.455 billion in vehicle property tax collection, or â‚¡3.289 billion counting sale margins, and has said corrections would apply only to future tax periods. It is still a bill and has to clear the legislative process. For anyone with a shipment already in motion, the sequence is simple. Check what the ministry values your vehicle at, budget against that figure rather than your purchase price, and confirm whether you have already imported a vehicle this year before booking anything else.
