Costa Rica moves electronic invoices to version 4.4, mandatory from 1 September 2025

What changed in detail

Costa Rica’s Dirección General de Tributación adopted Resolución MH-DGT-RES-0027-2024, “Resolución General sobre las disposiciones técnicas de los comprobantes electrónicos para efectos tributarios”, on 13 November 2024. It was published in Alcance N° 186 to La Gaceta N° 217 on 19 November 2024 and took effect on publication.

The resolution sets the technical provisions for electronic tax receipts and adopts version 4.4 of the “Anexos y Estructuras”, the XML formats and specifications for issuing comprobantes electrónicos. It follows Decreto Ejecutivo N° 44739-H of 2 October 2024, the new regulation on electronic receipts. Article 12 repeals resolutions DGT-R-12-2018, DGT-R-39-2018 and DGT-R-033-2019, the earlier rules on electronic receipts.

Its transitional provisions, as published:

• Transitorio I gave taxpayers six months from 1 December 2024, to 1 June 2025, to implement version 4.4. After that, version 4.4 would take full effect and receipts issued in earlier versions would not be recognised as valid. Taxpayers ready earlier could adopt it from 1 April 2025.
• Transitorio II required sellers of human medicines to add the medicine registration and pharmaceutical form fields in version 4.3 from 1 January 2025.
• Transitorio III suspended the QR code on the printed representation until the DGT announces it.

Resolución MH-DGT-RES-0001-2025 of 3 February 2025 rewrote Transitorio I to give nine months from 1 December 2024, so version 4.4 became mandatory from 1 September 2025.

What it means

The transition is complete. Since 1 September 2025, receipts in version 4.3 or earlier are not valid for tax purposes, and version 4.4 is the format in use. The three-month extension was the only change to the deadline; the early-adoption date of 1 April 2025 stayed as it was.

The DGT tied the extension to the launch of its TRIBU-CR system, which uses electronic receipt data to pre-fill tax returns. That makes the content of each receipt, and not only its format, matter: fields completed wrongly in version 4.4 can feed through into the taxpayer’s pre-filled declarations.