Paraguay vs Costa Rica Residency

Why the numbers are missing, and why that matters

This is the second time on this site that a country's figures have been left out for the same reason. The Cypriot page in our German cluster publishes no Cypriot rates because the Cyprus tax department returned HTTP 403. Costa Rica joins it.

The temptation is obvious. Type "Costa Rica rentista requirements" into a search engine and you will get a confident monthly figure within seconds, repeated across a dozen relocation sites. Some of them are probably right. But an amount that lives only in secondary content is exactly the kind of claim this site exists not to publish, and the people most likely to be hurt by a stale figure are the ones planning a move around it.

So the practical instruction is: open the Reglamento to Ley N° 9996, which we link at the foot of this page, and read the amounts there. If you cannot open it either, ask a Costa Rican immigration lawyer and get the answer in writing.

What can be compared without those figures

The shape of the two systems

The Costa Rican tax rows come from PwC, which this site treats as corroboration rather than as legal authority. They are included because the structural point stands regardless of the exact band boundaries: Costa Rica taxes what is earned inside Costa Rica, which is the same family of system as Paraguay's, not a different species.

The thing people get wrong about two territorial systems

Territorial is a family, not a regime. Each country writes its own source rules and its own exceptions, so two people with identical businesses can land in different places in each country. "Costa Rica is territorial too" is the beginning of an analysis, not the end of one.

The question that actually decides the outcome is where each of your income streams is treated as arising, tested stream by stream against that country's rules. Our long-form version of that argument is territorial tax explained.

Where Costa Rica is the better answer

We are based in Asunción, so take this as the section where we argue against our own interest.

• Infrastructure for arrivals. Costa Rica has decades of expatriate settlement behind it: English-speaking professional services, established medical tourism, and a rental market that expects foreigners.
• Connectivity. Direct flights to multiple North American cities. Asunción is a connection, usually two.
• Political and institutional stability with a long track record, which matters more over a twenty-year horizon than any current tax rate.
• Environment. If your reason for moving is climate, coastline and biodiversity rather than cost, this is not a close contest.

Where Paraguay is the better answer

• No capital requirement in the general route. No purchase, no deposit, no minimum monthly income published as a category condition. For someone whose capital is tied up in a business, that is decisive.
• Cost of living. Costa Rica is among the more expensive countries in Central America; Paraguay is among the cheapest in South America. Over a five-year horizon that gap is usually larger than any tax difference either country produces.
• Published fees. You can read the migration authority's arancel and do the arithmetic before you commit.
• MERCOSUR access for nationals of the eight listed countries, at a lower official fee.

What neither of them does

Neither residency ends your existing tax residency. That is decided by the law of the country you are leaving, and in several countries by a filing with a deadline: Spain's Article 9 and its exit tax at Article 95 bis, Argentina's loss-of-residence causals and the RG 4760/2020 filing, Mexico's 15-day aviso, Colombia's 183-day rule and its DIAN accreditation.

The full treatment is at what Paraguayan residency does not solve, and in Spanish, with the country detail, at lo que la residencia paraguaya no resuelve.

How to make this decision properly

1. Get the Costa Rican thresholds in writing from the Reglamento or from a Costa Rican lawyer, with a date.
2. Price a realistic year in each place: rent, health cover, schooling if relevant, and flights home.
3. Ask what each country expects of your presence, and be honest about how many days you will really spend there.
4. Resolve your exit from your current tax residency first, because in most cases it is the binding constraint rather than the destination.

Read next: the full comparison matrix, Paraguay vs Panama and cost of living in Asunción.