Costa Rica has more than 360,000 rented homes, but just over 32,000 people and companies are registered to pay tax on income from renting property. Former Finance Ministry officials say the gap between the size of the rental market and the size of the tax base does not add up.
At the end of 2025, the Finance Ministry counted 32,373 active taxpayers under the tax on real estate capital income, which is the levy that applies to rent. Of those, 14,441 were individuals and 17,932 were legal entities such as corporations. The housing figure comes from the National Household Survey run by the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INEC). It counts homes only. Offices, retail space, warehouses and land leased across the country are not included.
The registered base has barely moved since the tax took effect. In 2020, the first year it was applied after the 2018 fiscal reform, the ministry counted 32,291 active filers. Five years later the total had grown by 82, or 0.3%, and between 2021 and 2024 it stayed below 30,000.
The rental market grew over the same period as the household survey counted about 360,000 rented homes in 2025, up 25% from five years earlier. It also found 120,500 people who reported receiving some kind of rental income, an increase of 28%, though that figure includes rentals of movable property such as vehicles.
Revenue tracked the taxpayer count rather than the market. Adjusted for inflation, collection from the tax stayed between ₡72.5 billion and ₡77.5 billion (about $157 million to $168 million) each year from 2021 to 2025. The ₡76.5 billion (about $166 million) collected in 2025 represented 3.1% of total income tax revenue.
The numbers do not mean that more than 300,000 property owners are evading taxes. A single owner can rent out several homes. The household survey and the tax registry measure different populations, and some rental income is legally declared under other tax categories.
Fernando Rodríguez, a researcher at the National University (UNA) and a former vice minister of revenue, said the registered number does not appear reasonable given the size of the market. He said part of the gap likely reflects how difficult rentals are to monitor, because landlords can stay invisible to the tax system when tenants have no need for an invoice to deduct the expense.
Rodríguez said the problem is sharper for residential leases than for commercial ones, since businesses usually need a receipt to claim value-added tax credits or deduct costs. He added that under certain conditions individuals and companies can report rental income under the corporate profits tax instead, such as when the property is tied to their main business activity.
Former Finance Minister Elian Villegas described the rental market as opaque and said the tax administration should carry out a significant review of it. Villegas said that review should extend to capital gains from property sales, where he believes considerable revenue is being lost.
Rodríguez cautioned that closer enforcement is costly for an administration with limited resources. Tracking tourist rentals, for example, can require monitoring booking platforms and intelligence work to identify hosts missing from tax records. That effort competes with audits likely to recover larger sums.
The system also places the first burden on taxpayers. Mario Ramos, director general of the Tax Administration, has said Costa Rica’s tax system runs on self-assessment. Taxpayers register, calculate what they owe and file on their own, and the ministry checks afterward.
Under current rules, anyone who receives rent from property in Costa Rica must register and declare it, whether the owner is an individual or a company. The tax is 15% of the rent after a standard 15% deduction for expenses, which works out to roughly 12.75% of gross rent. Returns are filed monthly through the ministry’s TRIBU-CR platform, by the 15th day of the month after the rent is collected.
The obligation applies even to modest rents. Law 9635 exempts home rents of up to 1.5 base salaries, currently ₡693,300 (about $1,500) a month, from value-added tax, but that exemption does not cover income tax. Above that threshold, tenants pay 13% VAT on the full rent, which the landlord collects and passes on to the ministry.
The gap fits a broader concern raised by international organizations, though none has singled out rentals. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found in its 2025 economic survey of Costa Rica that about 43% of taxpayers required to issue invoices do not do so. The International Monetary Fund has described Costa Rica’s tax base as relatively small and eroded by exemptions and compliance gaps.
How much of the difference between the rental market and the tax rolls comes from legal structure, and how much from unpaid taxes, remains an open question. For now, the number of registered filers stands almost exactly where it did when the tax began.
