Starting Tuesday, a 13% tax will show up on your bill from Booking.com, Expedia, ChatGPT and 17 other digital platforms that were not taxed before.
The Finance Ministry announced over the weekend that it had expanded the official register of foreign digital service providers subject to Costa Rica’s value-added tax. The updated list grows from 161 providers to 181. Among the new names are the travel booking sites Booking.com and Expedia, the AI services ChatGPT, Claude and Grok, and the social platform TikTok.
This is not a new tax as Costa Rica has charged 13% VAT on foreign digital services used inside the country since October 2020, when the mechanism took effect under Law 9635, the public finance reform. Netflix, Spotify and Disney+ have been on the register for years. What changed is the roster, not the rule.
You will not have to file anything or calculate anything as your bank will do it for you. When a charge from one of these platforms posts to your card account, the card issuer adds the 13% and forwards it to the tax authority.
The price the platform advertises does not change; the line on your statement does. A $20 monthly subscription becomes roughly $22.60. A $400 hotel booking picks up about $52.
The idea behind the tax is a hotel room sold by a company registered in Costa Rica has always carried VAT. A hotel room sold to the same guest by a company operating from abroad often did not, which left local businesses competing against foreign platforms on unequal terms.
The register exists to close that gap, and the tax administration updates it periodically as providers enter the market, disappear or get absorbed by competitors.
Not every foreign platform gets taxed through your bank. Some providers register directly with the tax administration and collect the 13% themselves, charging it on their own invoice. In those cases the card issuer does not add anything, because the tax has already been paid. If you use several international subscription services, it is worth reading a statement or two after September 8 to see which route each one takes, so you know what you are actually paying.
There is one detail the ministry’s announcement does not address, and it matters for anyone who travels. The tax is meant to apply to services used or consumed inside Costa Rica. Booking sites are now on the list, but a resident using a Costa Rican card to reserve a hotel in Panama or Miami is buying a service consumed somewhere else. The announcement does not say how those transactions will be handled.
If you buy any of these services for a registered business rather than personal use, the VAT you pay may qualify as a tax credit against what your business owes, provided the usual conditions are met. That is a question for your accountant, not a line item you can claim automatically.
The amounts involved are not trivial for the treasury. Cross-border digital services brought in more than â‚¡6 billion during 2025, roughly $13 million, and that was before travel booking and the major AI subscription services joined the register. Travel platforms in particular move far larger sums per transaction than a streaming subscription does, which suggests the September expansion will produce a noticeably bigger number next year.
The full register of 181 providers is published by the Finance Ministry on its website, and the tax administration is authorized to add or remove names simply by publishing an updated version. That means the list you check today may not be the list that applies six months from now.
For households already watching subscription costs climb, the real effect is a modest but permanent increase across a widening slice of monthly spending. The platforms most people use every day are steadily being pulled into a tax system built for businesses with an address Costa Rica and the direction of travel is only one way.
