Do you need an onward ticket for Costa Rica?
Required
Costa Rica requires a return or onward ticket — and the visa-free stay is 180 days, not the 90 that most pages on this subject repeat.
An official page or statute states this condition. The wording is quoted below and the source is linked.
Last verified 5 August 2026 · Central America
“Tiquete, boleto o pasaje de regreso al país de origen o de continuación de viaje, o bien el plan de navegación en el que conste el puerto de destino.”A ticket or passage of return to the country of origin or of continuation of the journey, or else a navigation plan stating the port of destination.
What the rule actually says
The 180-day figure is worth stating on its own, because a very large number of pages about Costa Rican entry say 90. It is 180 days visa-free.
Note the third limb of the quotation. Costa Rica contemplates arrival by sea and accepts a navigation plan naming the destination port in place of a ticket.
A solvency expectation of roughly USD 100 per month of stay is widely repeated, but the page it comes from blocked retrieval, so treat that figure as unverified rather than as a threshold you can rely on.
Who checks
Published as an entry requirement by the immigration authority, so it can be asked for on arrival. Nothing official describes airline check-in screening.
A note on airline enforcement, because almost every page on this subject states it as fact: airlines screen these rules through IATA Timatic, a paid business product with no public interface. Nobody outside the industry can check what it says for a given route on a given day. New Zealand is the only authority in this set whose own published text names the check-in desk.
What would make this wrong
- migracion.go.cr returned an HTTP 403 bot challenge on every retrieval attempt, so the DGME wording above came through an official secondary route rather than a live fetch of the DGME page itself.
Sources
- Entry requirements (Instituto Costarricense de Turismo (visitcostarica.com))
- Costa Rica travel advice: entry requirements (UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office — another government's summary, used because the destination's own page could not be retrieved)
Airports in Costa Rica
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Elsewhere in Central America
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