Costa Rica’s position on this is widely misunderstood in both directions. Some arrive believing everything is permitted; others assume the opposite. Neither is right, and the gap between them is where foreigners get into serious trouble.
This page sets out what the law actually criminalises. It is written for people living here or thinking about it, and the most important part is the section on minors.
The basic position
Selling sex, by a consenting adult, is not a criminal offence in Costa Rica. There is no provision in the Penal Code that criminalises it.
Note carefully what that does and does not mean. It is not a regulated, licensed trade. There is no permit, no registration scheme, and no legal framework establishing it as work. It is simply not prohibited — which is a weaker and more precarious position than legality, and it leaves the people involved with very few protections.
What the law targets is not the seller. It is everyone who profits from, organises or coerces.
What is criminal
Proxenetismo — promoting or inducing another person’s prostitution — carries a prison sentence in the range of two to five years, rising to four to ten in aggravated forms, including where the victim is under 18 or where there is coercion, deception or abuse of authority.
Rufianería — coercively living off another person’s earnings from sex work — runs from two to eight years, and higher again where the victim is a minor.
Human trafficking is dealt with under the 2012 anti-trafficking law, which also created the national anti-trafficking coalition and introduced a specific offence of promoting sexual exploitation as tourism, punishable by four to eight years.
Brothels are worth a precise word. We could not identify a Penal Code article that criminalises operating a brothel as such. In practice an operator is exposed under proxenetismo or rufianería — which is not the same as the activity being lawful, and anyone imagining a legal business here should take Costa Rican legal advice rather than inferring permission from an absence.
Minors: the part that matters most
This is where foreign nationals most often misjudge Costa Rica, sometimes catastrophically, and it deserves to be read slowly.
Costa Rica does not have a single flat age of consent. Since the Ley de Relaciones Impropias of 2016, in force from January 2017, it operates an age-gap model:
- Sexual relations with a person aged 13 or 14, where the other person is five or more years older — three to six years’ imprisonment.
- Sexual relations with a person aged 15 to 17, where the other person is seven or more years older — two to three years’ imprisonment.
- Substantially higher penalties, in the range of four to ten years, where the adult is a relative, guardian, teacher, or otherwise in a position of trust or authority.
The same law prohibited all marriage of anyone under 18, closing a route that had previously been used to legitimise these relationships.
Now apply that to the situation of a foreign adult. Given ordinary age differences, almost any sexual contact between a foreign adult and a person under 18 in Costa Rica will fall inside one of these offences. The teenager’s apparent willingness is not a defence. Being told a different age is not a defence you should expect to rely on.
And paying a person under 18 for sexual acts is a separate and more serious offence again, with sentences reaching four to ten years depending on the child’s age. It does not matter that adult sex work is not itself criminalised. The moment a minor is involved, an entirely different set of provisions applies.
And do not assume a venue’s door check protects you. These offences are drafted around the age of the young person, and it is the adult who is prosecuted. Whether a bar checked identification, whether the venue was licensed, whether someone else was supposed to be responsible — none of that shifts the liability off the person who went home with a minor. Many people find that harsh. It is nonetheless how it works, and it is the reason to be conservative rather than trusting.
Costa Rica has legislated repeatedly and deliberately in this area — in 1999, 2007, 2012 and 2016 — and the direction of travel has been consistently toward heavier penalties and fewer defences.
How the sentences actually compare
There is a claim that circulates in the expat community — that in Costa Rica you get longer in prison for a sexual offence with a minor than for killing someone. It is worth checking, because it is partly true and partly false, and the true half is the more interesting one.
Here are the ranges as published in the statutes that set them.
Killing:
- Homicidio simple — 12 to 18 years.
- Homicidio calificado — 20 to 35 years. The qualifying circumstances include killing a child under 12, killing a spouse or close relative, killing for payment, and killing with treachery or cruelty.
- Femicidio — 20 to 35 years.
- Homicidio culposo, negligent killing — six months to 8 years, or one to 10 years where a death is caused by driving in aggravated circumstances.
Sexual offences against minors:
- Violación — 10 to 16 years. Note that where the victim is under 13, being under 13 is what makes the act rape; it does not raise the range.
- Violación calificada, where the offender is a relative, guardian or in a position of authority — 12 to 18 years.
- Abusos sexuales contra personas menores de edad — 3 to 8 years, or 4 to 10 aggravated.
- Relaciones sexuales con menores, the age-gap offence — 3 to 6 years, or 2 to 3, or 4 to 10 where trust or authority is abused.
- Paying a minor for sexual acts — 4 to 10 years where the child is under 13, 3 to 8 where 13 to 15, 2 to 6 where 15 to 18.
So the claim fails against intentional killing. No sexual offence against a minor reaches 20 years. The heaviest, violación calificada at 12 to 18, is the same range as homicidio simple and well short of the 20 to 35 for aggravated homicide or femicidio.
But it holds against negligent killing, and that comparison is genuinely striking. Causing a death through negligence — a road death, in most cases — carries six months to eight years. Rape of a child under 13 carries 10 to 16. The minimum sentence for the sexual offence is higher than the maximum for the negligent killing.
Put another way: kill someone through carelessness at the wheel and the range starts at six months. Rape a child and it starts at ten years.
Two further points of context. Costa Rica’s overall maximum prison term is 50 years, and where someone is convicted on multiple counts the total is capped there — which is how sentences longer than any single range are reached. And killing a child under 12 is itself a qualifying circumstance that lifts a homicide into the 20-to-35 bracket, so the law does not treat harm to children lightly on either side of the comparison.
The version of this claim worth repeating, then, is the narrower one: Costa Rica punishes a sexual offence against a child more heavily than it punishes a negligent death. That is true, and it tells you something real about the country’s priorities.
Jacó, and the “red zone” proposal of 2026
If you want evidence that the adult position is unregulated rather than legal, the clearest example arrived in June 2026.
The mayor of Garabito, Francisco González, proposed a 70-hectare “permissive area” in Jacó where sex work, nightlife and eventually regulated drug use would be concentrated away from the centre of the beach town. His argument was that Jacó already deals with visible prostitution, drug sales and associated crime, particularly at night, and that moving it into a controlled zone would return the town centre to families and mainstream tourism. He said he was not trying to promote either activity, but to regulate what already exists.
The proposal was rejected across the board — by lawmakers, the Attorney General’s Office, the National Tourism Chamber and the Ombudsman’s Office. Attorney General Carlo Díaz called the comments unfortunate and warned against normalising sexual exploitation or creating somewhere that makes life easier for drug traffickers. Tourism leaders said the country should not signal that any part of it is open for marketing as a sex-tourism or drug destination.
It followed an investigation by Revista Dominical documenting Jacó’s sex-tourism economy, including the presence of American and Canadian visitors, the bars and casinos around it, and alleged links to organised crime and money laundering. Jacó is one of the main Pacific beach towns and it carries one of the country’s most visible sex-tourism reputations.
The decisive legal objection is the one worth remembering. A municipality cannot create a local exception to national criminal law. A zoning plan can define land use, permits and what businesses may operate where — it cannot make lawful something the Penal Code prohibits, and it cannot confer a licence the national framework does not provide.
Which is exactly the point this page began with. There is no regulatory regime to opt into. A mayor proposing to build one, and being told firmly that he cannot, is the proof.
What the data shows
Judicial figures record 2,772 cases of sexual relations with minors in 2020, rising to 3,203 in the first nine months of 2025.
Recorded cases of commercial sexual exploitation of children specifically are far lower — a handful per year in the cantons where it is most expected. That gap is not good news, and the institutions themselves say so: cases are frequently classified initially as something else, such as neglect, and rarely reclassified afterwards. A child-protection official quoted in a 2026 university study described a very large gap in knowledge of the crime.
So the low exploitation numbers should be read as a measurement problem, not as an absence.
Tourism, and the code of conduct
The Costa Rican Tourism Board runs a Code of Conduct for the protection of children and adolescents against commercial sexual exploitation in travel and tourism, which hotels, tour operators and transport companies sign up to. Several hundred companies have subscribed.
It is voluntary self-regulation — training, an ethics policy, an annual report — and carries no penalties of its own. The penalties come from the criminal law described above. But the existence of the programme tells you how seriously the sector treats the reputational and legal exposure, and staff at signatory businesses are trained to notice and report.
The people selling: no licence, and one recent change
There is no registration scheme and no licensing regime for sex workers in Costa Rica.
You will read in many places that sex workers here are required to hold a health card and undergo regular testing. We could find no legal basis for that requirement, and it should be treated as folklore until someone produces the regulation.
What did change, in February 2024, is that the social security system created an occupational code for sex work, allowing people to enrol as self-employed contributors under their actual occupation rather than declaring a false one — and so to access healthcare and a pension in their own name. It was reported as the first such recognition in Latin America.
That is an administrative recognition rather than a legislative one. It does not create employment rights, and it does not change anything in the criminal law. But it is a meaningful shift, and it is the direction the question is moving in here.
If you live here, or are moving here
- The absence of a prohibition is not a permission structure. Nothing about the adult position creates a lawful business, and organising or profiting from it is squarely criminal.
- Assume anyone who looks young is under 18. The age-gap rules mean a foreign adult has effectively no safe margin, and the consequences run to years in prison.
- A criminal conviction here is an immigration matter too. For a resident or an applicant, it puts the right to stay in question at renewal and at re-entry — on top of the sentence.
- Reporting is possible and expected. Suspected exploitation of a child can be reported to the child protection agency or the judicial police, and tourism businesses in the Code of Conduct programme are trained to act on it.
Why we have written this plainly
Costa Rica has spent twenty-five years tightening this area of its law, and it has a reputation it is actively trying to shed. People still arrive with assumptions formed by that older reputation, and some of them commit serious offences believing they are in a permissive jurisdiction.
They are not. The adult position is unregulated rather than free, and where children are involved the law is severe, recently strengthened, and enforced.
About this page
We publish this because accurate information here protects people — both the vulnerable and the badly informed.
CRIE — Costa Rica Immigration Experts handles residency applications, renewals, permanent residency and citizenship. We are not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice.
See the types of residency in Costa Rica, or get in touch.
Sources: the Tico Times on the June 2026 Jacó “red zone” proposal and the reaction to it; Costa Rica’s laws against the sexual exploitation of minors (1999 and 2007), the anti-trafficking law of 2012, the Ley de Relaciones Impropias of 2016, the Instituto Costarricense de Turismo’s Code of Conduct, judicial statistics reported through a 2026 study by the national universities for the child protection agency, and reporting by La Nación on the 2024 social security recognition. Sentencing ranges are given as published in the reforming statutes and, for homicide, the Código Penal; Costa Rica’s sexual-offence provisions have been renumbered several times, so confirm the current text with a Costa Rican lawyer before relying on it.