Home / Shipping to Costa Rica / How to Ship from China to Costa Rica

How to Ship from China to Costa Rica: Moin, Caldera & the RTN You Need First

Costa Rica is the one country in Central America with a free trade agreement with China. It was signed in April 2010 and has been in force since 1 August 2011 — the first agreement of its kind China concluded with a Central American country. On paper that makes this the most favourable lane in the region. In practice, the preference is claimed, not given: it applies to the tariff line you declare, and only when a valid preferential certificate of origin travels with the goods. Importers who assume the discount arrives automatically are the ones who end up paying the standard rate and wondering why.

The second thing to understand is that Costa Rica faces two oceans, and the choice between them is a real decision. Moin sits on the Caribbean side near Limón and is operated by APM Terminals; Caldera sits on the Pacific side near Puntarenas and is operated by DP World. They are not interchangeable. Which one you use should be decided by where your warehouse is and by how the box actually gets there — Caldera is a Pacific crossing, Moin involves the Panama Canal or a transhipment.

The third thing is the one that catches first-time importers, and it is not a customs form at all. If you are bringing in anything electrical or electronic, it has to be registered before it arrives, under a national technical registration administered by the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Commerce. That registration takes weeks, not days, and it is the single most common reason a first shipment to Costa Rica sits at the port. Start it before your goods are even manufactured.

What this guide covers, and the two decisions that shape the bill

This is written for a buyer bringing goods out of China into Costa Rica for the first time. It follows the shipment in the order the problems actually arrive: which coast, which port, what the free trade agreement does and does not do for you, the product registrations that have to exist before anything ships, the paperwork that gets filed at the border, how the tax is calculated, and how long it all takes.

It does not quote freight rates. Those move with the market and any number printed here would be wrong within weeks. What it does instead is show where the money goes and which decisions move the total, so that when you do get a quotation you can read it for what it leaves out as well as what it contains.

Costa Rica is a country of roughly five million people with a stable democracy, no standing army, and an economy built on medical device manufacturing, agriculture — coffee, bananas, pineapples — tourism, and business services. It is one of the strongest logistics markets in Central America precisely because it is a manufacturing exporter: customs brokers, bonded warehouses and cold chain at SJO are all well developed, and the paperwork is professional. That is good news for a first importer. The currency is the Costa Rican colón, but commercial invoices in US dollars are normal and widely accepted in trade. Mains power is 120 V at 60 Hz with US-style plugs, which matters if you are importing anything that plugs into a wall.

Bilateral trade with China has grown steadily. Published figures for 2025 put total two-way trade at about US$4.45 billion, with Chinese exports around US$2.65 billion, making China Costa Rica's second-largest trading partner after the United States. Chinese goods are already thoroughly embedded in the retail and industrial mix here.

Two coasts, two ports: choosing between Moin and Caldera

New importers often ask which port is "the main one", as though there is a single answer. There is not. There are two, they are on opposite sides of the country, and the right one is a function of your inland address.

The second factor is the shape of the voyage. Cargo from China crossing the Pacific reaches Caldera without a canal transit. Reaching Moin means either a Panama Canal transit or a transhipment on the isthmus, and both add handling and time. That is not a reason to avoid Moin — it is a reason to read two quotations side by side rather than accepting the first one.

The third factor is the road. The Central Valley to Moin runs on Route 32 through the Braulio Carrillo national park, a mountain road that carries heavy rain and is prone to landslides and closures during the wet season. If your delivery schedule cannot absorb a day of uncertainty, that is worth knowing before you commit to the Caribbean port for a Central Valley warehouse.

What the China-Costa Rica trade pact does to your duty bill

Negotiations opened in January 2009, the agreement was signed in April 2010, and it entered into force on 1 August 2011. Both sides committed to staged tariff elimination: roughly 60 percent of tariff lines went to zero immediately, with around another 30 percent phasing down over five to fifteen years. Costa Rica's schedule was written to remove tariffs on more than 90 percent of Chinese-origin goods over fifteen years; China's schedule covers more than 95 percent of Costa Rican goods on a similar horizon.

There is a useful contrast here. Costa Rica is also a party to CAFTA-DR with the United States, under which most US-origin consumer and industrial goods have entered duty-free since January 2015. Chinese-origin goods get nothing from CAFTA-DR. If you are comparing a US quote with a Chinese one, the tariff treatment is not the same, and the difference comes from this agreement, not from the freight.

The practical consequence is simple. The duty you pay is set by three things: the HS code you declare, the origin you can prove, and whether anyone actually claims the preference on the entry. Get any one of those wrong and you pay the standard rate on the full value.

Origin rules: the certificate that turns a tariff line into zero

A preferential certificate of origin under the China–Costa Rica agreement is issued in China — through the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade or China Customs, both of which have been issuing them since the agreement took effect in August 2011. Ask your supplier for it before production finishes, not after the goods have sailed. Retrospective certificates are difficult and sometimes impossible, and the cost of not having one is the whole duty line.

Three things make a certificate fail at the border, and all three are avoidable:

• The description does not match. The origin certificate, the commercial invoice and the bill of lading should describe the same goods to the same consignee. Mismatched consignee names are a common cause of a rejected claim.
• The HS code is inconsistent. The code on the certificate should be the code on the entry. If your broker classifies differently from your supplier, resolve it before the vessel sails, not at the counter.
• The routing breaks the direct-consignment rule. If the cargo transits a third country, expect to show the through bill of lading and the transit documents. Transhipment alone does not kill a claim; undocumented transhipment does.

The certificate costs very little. The tariff it removes can be the entire margin on a first order. It is the cheapest document in the whole file and the one most often missing.

RTN: the electronics registration that stops first shipments

This is the section to read twice if you are importing anything with a plug, a circuit board or a battery.

RTN — Registro Técnico Nacional — is a national technical registration administered by the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Commerce (MEIC). Electrical and electronic products entering Costa Rica need it, and it is routinely described as the most commonly overlooked requirement on this lane and the leading cause of customs holds for first-time shippers. Registration is reported to take two to four weeks. That is longer than most manufacturing lead times people assume, which is why the advice is to begin the process before the goods are made.

RTN is not the only product gate. Depending on what you are shipping, one or more of these may apply as well:

If you are unsure which of these applies to your product, that question should be answered before you place the order, not after the container lands. A shipment that arrives without its registration does not clear faster because it is urgent — it waits, and it accrues storage while it does.

Spanish labels and Spanish paperwork, not English-only documents

Costa Rica requires product labels, instruction manuals and packaging to be in Spanish. This is a consumer-protection requirement, not a customs formality, and it is enforced at the border: officers at SJO routinely flag shipments with English-only labelling for secondary inspection. A carton printed in English and Chinese but not Spanish is one of the cheapest problems to prevent and one of the more expensive to fix after arrival, because the cost lands as storage and demurrage rather than as a reprint.

Build a Spanish labelling check into your pre-shipment routine. It costs a fraction of a percent of the order value and it removes an entire category of delay.

The same logic applies to the commercial invoice. It should show the goods description in Spanish where practical, unit and total values, the HS code, and the Incoterm — and it helps to break out FOB value, freight and insurance separately, because Costa Rica assesses duty on the CIF value and the officer needs to see how that number was built.

One more thing on the invoice: do not under-declare. TICA compares declared values against reference data for comparable goods and flags discrepancies automatically. Penalties for undervaluation routinely exceed the duty saved, and a flagged importer tends to get flagged again. Declare the real transaction value.

Getting the HS code right before TICA accepts the declaration

TICA is Costa Rica's customs information system, and the DUA — Documento Único Aduanero — is the single import declaration filed through it, electronically, by a licensed customs agent. Permits that sit outside customs are handled through VUCE, the foreign trade single window.

HS classification is where a lot of avoidable trouble starts. TICA cross-references declared codes against trade data, and a misclassification — even an innocent one — can trigger an automatic audit, penalties, and weeks of delay. It also silently changes your duty: the same product under two codes can sit at zero under the FTA schedule and at 15 percent outside it.

The fix is boring and effective: agree the code in writing with your broker before you book. Give them the product specification, the material composition, the intended use and photographs if the description is ambiguous. A code confirmed before sailing is worth more than any amount of argument after arrival.

IVA at 13%, plus the selective consumption tax that follows

Three separate things can land on an import entry, and they stack.

A worked illustration, using round numbers and no freight figures: goods with a CIF value of US$10,000, a duty rate of 8 percent. Duty is US$800. The base for IVA is US$10,800, so IVA at 13 percent is US$1,404. Total tax before any broker fee, port charge or inland haulage is US$2,204 — about 22 percent of the CIF value, on a duty rate that looked like 8 percent. That gap is the whole point of this section.

On top of the three lines above expect small statutory stamps and administrative charges, plus the customs agent's fee and, if the box waits, storage and demurrage. None of those are in the duty rate.

Where de minimis really sits, and why two figures circulate

If you search for Costa Rica's de minimis threshold you will find two numbers, and they are not describing the same thing.

• US$50 FOB. This figure appears in commercial shipping references and in our own Costa Rica hub page: shipments at or below it are described as exempt from duty and taxes. It is the conservative number and the one to plan around.
• US$500. This figure appears in parcel and traveller references, describing the duty-free allowance for personal parcels and for goods carried by arriving travellers.

For a commercial import of any real size the threshold is not going to save you, and a landed-cost model built on the assumption that it might will be wrong.

Sea transit from Chinese ports to Costa Rica, realistically

Published transit ranges for this lane are roughly 30–45 days for a full container and 35–55 days for LCL, port to port. Air runs about 5–10 days and courier roughly 3–7 days door to door.

Those ranges are wide for reasons that have nothing to do with the ocean leg:

• Which coast. Caldera is a Pacific crossing; Moin adds a canal transit or an isthmus transhipment.
• Direct or transhipped. A service that calls Costa Rica directly will beat one that relays through Panama, Manzanillo or a US gateway, sometimes by a week.
• Season. Chinese New Year shuts production and empties sailings for weeks. The pre-Christmas push tightens space from roughly August onward.
• The wet season at the receiving end. May to November brings heavy rain, and with it the landslide risk on the Moin road and slower inland turnaround.

Note the shape of our sea service: it ends at the port. We deliver to Moin or Caldera; import clearance and final delivery inside Costa Rica are handled by the consignee with their customs agent. If you want a door-to-door price, say so and we will quote it as DDP with those destination elements built in.

Air freight into SJO: there is no nonstop freighter from China

Juan Santamaría International Airport (SJO) in Alajuela, about 20 km from San José, is the main gateway and the one that handles the bulk of air cargo. Daniel Oduber Quirós (LIR) in Liberia serves Guanacaste and the Pacific north.

The thing to know about this lane is that there is no scheduled nonstop freighter from China to Costa Rica. Air cargo almost always moves via a US gateway — Miami, Los Angeles, Houston are the common ones — with Panama and European hubs appearing in some routings. That is why the transit estimate is 5–10 days rather than the two or three a direct flight would give, and it is why a routing that looks odd on paper can be the fastest one available.

Costa Rica is a serious air-freight market, and not by accident: medical device manufacturing is one of its largest export industries, so SJO has mature cold-chain, pharma handling and bonded storage. If you are shipping temperature-sensitive or high-value goods, that infrastructure is a genuine advantage over most of Central America.

On batteries: goods with batteries installed can usually move with an MSDS and proper declaration. Standalone lithium batteries are dangerous goods and need to be declared and handled as such. Tell us before booking, not after.

LCL or FCL when your monthly volume is still modest

Most first orders are LCL, and that is fine. The trade-off is straightforward.

LCL has a low entry point — we work from 1 CBM — and lets you test a market without filling a box. What you give up is time and handling: consolidated cargo waits for a full container at origin, gets stripped at destination, and passes through more hands, which means more chance of a dented carton and more exposure to inspection. There are also deconsolidation charges at the receiving end that do not appear in an FCL quote.

FCL is faster end to end, is handled less, and gives you a door you control. As a rough rule of thumb many forwarders treat somewhere around 15–18 CBM as the point where a 20-foot box starts to make commercial sense, but that is a starting point for a conversation, not a rule — dense cargo crosses over earlier, bulky cargo later, and the destination charges on LCL can move the line substantially.

If you expect to ship monthly, ask us to price a single 20-foot box against the same volume as LCL. The answer is often closer than people expect, and the time saved is usually worth more than the difference.

The free zone regime under Ley 7210, in plain terms

A large share of Costa Rican manufacturing — medical devices especially — operates inside the free zone regime (Régimen de Zonas Francas) created by Ley 7210 and administered by PROCOMER. Companies admitted to the regime import raw materials, components and capital goods under duty and IVA exemption, on the condition that the finished output is produced under the regime.

If your company is a free-zone operator, say so at the quoting stage. The documentation differs, the entry is filed differently, and the goods move under a different control regime than a normal commercial import. Getting that wrong means filing the wrong kind of entry and unpicking it afterwards.

There is also an inward processing arrangement (perfeccionamiento activo) for goods brought in to be transformed and re-exported, which suspends rather than eliminates the taxes. If your business model is import–process–re-export, ask whether that fits better than a standard entry; your customs agent will know which of the two applies to your flows.

What a customs agent handles, and when the red channel opens

The DUA is filed electronically through TICA, and it is filed by a licensed customs agent (agente aduanero). Before any of that can happen, the importing company needs to be properly registered with the customs and tax authorities as an importer. That registration is your first administrative task and it is not optional.

Once the entry is filed, one of three things happens. Standard clearance is commonly 1–2 days. Expedited clearance can run 6–12 hours for urgent, perishable or medical cargo. If the entry is selected for physical examination — the red channel — add 2–5 days, plus whatever the inspection itself finds.

The agent's fee covers classification, filing, liaison with the authorities and representation during inspection. Published ranges for broker fees on this lane run from a few hundred to around a thousand US dollars depending on value and complexity. Ask what is inside the number: some quotes include the permits handling, some bill it separately, and some do not include storage if the entry is held.

Selection for the red channel is not an accusation, but it is not random either. New importers, new products, unusual values, and RTN or labelling problems all make it more likely. Getting the paperwork right the first time is the cheapest way to stay in the green channel.

Packing for a humid climate and a long inland leg

A box leaving Shenzhen or Ningbo in a cool month and opening in the tropics five or six weeks later has been through a lot. The temperature swing alone will condense water inside the container — "container rain" — and it drips onto the top layer of cartons. Add a humid port, a wet season that runs from May into November, and an inland leg over mountain roads, and packing becomes a cost-control measure rather than a formality.

• Moisture. Desiccant in the container, a moisture barrier or stretch wrap on pallets, and cartons that are not already damp when they are loaded.
• Wood packaging. Pallets and crates must meet ISPM 15 — heat treated or fumigated, and stamped. Unstamped wood is a classic cause of a hold at the border, and it is not fixable at the port.
• Load security. If you are routing via Moin, assume the truck will climb and descend a wet mountain road. Strap, block and brace accordingly.
• Carton strength. transhipment means your boxes are handled more than once, by more than one set of equipment. Single-wall cartons that survive a factory floor do not always survive that.

Insurance, and what to do when cartons arrive wet

Cargo insurance is normally written on an all-risks basis at around 110 percent of the CIF value — the extra ten percent standing in for the profit you expected to make. It is inexpensive relative to the value at risk and it is the difference between a bad day and a bad year.

What it does not cover is worth knowing: inadequate packing is a standard exclusion. Cartons that collapse because they were never fit for the voyage are your problem, not the underwriter's. That is the other reason the previous section matters.

If cartons do arrive wet or crushed, the sequence protects the claim:

The document set we assemble before your cargo sails

Nothing here is exotic; the failures are almost always omissions rather than errors. Before a shipment leaves China, this is the file we want to see closed:

A forwarder who files the DUA, not just books the vessel

There is a meaningful difference between a forwarder who sells you space on a ship and one who understands what happens when the ship arrives. On this lane the second kind is worth having, because the expensive failures are administrative: a registration that was never applied for, a certificate of origin that was never requested, an HS code nobody checked, a label printed in the wrong language.

None of those are freight problems. All of them cost more than freight.

What we do is check the administrative path before we quote, tell you which coast and which port fits your delivery address, flag any registration your product needs, and hand you the duty plus IVA arithmetic so you can see the landed cost rather than just the freight line.

Related pages

Frequently asked questions