The annual obligations of a Costa Rican corporation, including the ones that do nothing.

The single most expensive misunderstanding we see among foreign property owners in Costa Rica is this one: my company does not trade, so it does not owe anything.

It does. A corporation in Costa Rica has annual obligations from the day it is registered until the day it is formally dissolved, regardless of whether it ever moves a colon.

What the company owes every year

Corporate tax

An annual tax on the existence of the legal entity itself, not on its profits. Active or dormant, the company owes it. Unpaid, it accumulates interest and penalties, and eventually the company can be flagged in the Registro.

Beneficial ownership declaration

The Registro de Transparencia y Beneficiarios Finales. The company declares who ultimately owns and controls it. It is filed annually, separately from anything else, and it catches a lot of foreign owners off guard because it did not exist when many of these companies were formed.

Tax filings

If the company is registered as a taxpayer, it files, even when the return is zero. A nil return is still a return.

Legal books and registry

Shareholder and board records must exist and be kept current. When a company is sold or a share transferred, this is the first thing anyone asks to see.

Registered agent and legal address

Notices go to the address on file. If that address is a lawyer you stopped working with in 2019, you will not receive the notice that starts a penalty clock.

What it costs to ignore

Nothing, right up until it costs a great deal. The failure mode is almost always the same: everything is fine for years, and then you try to sell the property, transfer the shares, or open a bank account — and discover the company cannot do any of those things until several years of filings are regularised, with penalties.

By then it is not a filing problem. It is a problem blocking a transaction with a deadline.

Should you keep the company at all?

A fair question, and the answer is not always yes. If the company exists only to hold one property and you have no other reason for it, compare what it costs to maintain against what it costs to dissolve. Sometimes dissolution is cheaper. Sometimes the property transfer that dissolution requires costs more than a decade of corporate tax.

It is worth calculating rather than assuming, in either direction.