Best Online Casinos in Costa Rica in 2024

Information about Costa Rica online gambling sites

Costa Rica may be a beautiful country with very friendly people but, when it comes to online casinos, it doesn't fare as well as many other nations.

With a poorly regulated gambling industry and confusing laws, playing at an online casino in Costa Rica may seem a little daunting for some. That's why Casino Guru has created this page dedicated to helping players find the best Costa Rica online gambling sites to play at.

If you're one of them, you'll be able to find a host of useful information here, such as where to find great bonuses, top-notch customer service, and casino games for you to enjoy. Costa Rica online casinos in our list are tested and curated by Casino Guru's very own team of experts.

Table of contents:

The history of online gambling in Costa Rica

Costa Rica became a republic in 1821 when it achieved full independence from Spain, but it wasn't for another 65 years before the first piece of gambling legislation appeared in 1886. This made it the first Caribbean country to formally regulate games of chance, to the extent all private gambling became officially legal.

Things stayed much the same until the advent of the internet and online casino games forced the government to declare that playing these was illegal. There was some respite in 2008, though, when the Reglamento de Casinos de Juego (casino game regulation) made state-run gambling legal.

The Junta de Protección Social, the state lottery operation, had a monopoly over all forms of gambling, which was generally just lottery-based games and not casino games.

The 2012 Costa Rica casino law made things a little clearer with an official update. This stipulated that domestic online casinos could only accept players from abroad and they must pay a 10% gambling income tax, as well as an annual fee for table games and slots games.

While this clarification was welcomed by local Costa Rica online gambling businesses, it doesn't tell us much about the legal situation for players there. The next section aims to find out.

Is it legal to visit an online casino in Costa Rica today?

Costa Rica online gambling legislation officially prohibits players from visiting online casinos there, but many people ignore this rule. In fact, some people refer to it as "de facto legal" in that the law is very rarely enforced.

That said, you may not feel comfortable with technically "breaking the law" there, so there are no Costa Rica-based gambling websites on this list. Instead, we can point out that there's nothing in Costa Rican law that stops you from visiting foreign online casinos, so you can do this perfectly legally.

Of course, you still need to find the best possible site to play on, which is what the next section will show you how to do.

How to choose the best online casino for Costa Rica players

While there are no online casinos based in Costa Rica that have been granted a license to offer casino games to players, there are still offshore online casinos that Costa Rican players can access.

To make it easier for you, we've compiled a comprehensive list of licensed online casinos that are available to you. Rather than spending countless hours researching each and every option, Casino Guru has done the heavy lifting for you.

Our team of experts has carefully evaluated each online casino available in Costa Rica, taking into account a range of factors. Based on this evaluation, we've assigned each casino a Safety Index, so you can quickly determine which one is the best fit for you.

Here's what we take into account:

• The amount of revenue generated by the casino (a higher revenue indicates a greater likelihood of the casino being able to pay out higher winnings)
• The fairness of its terms and conditions
• The number of complaints received by the casino in relation to its size

We then order the casinos by our recommendations, which you can see on this page by default. These are the casinos we advise you to start with if you want to find the best casino in Costa Rica online for you.

You may wish to look for other types of casinos, though. New casinos are known for their usually generous welcoming offers but beware: we don't know too much about them yet. To see these, click on the 'Newly opened' tab.

We also offer a list of filters that will help you trim the list down so that you only see the Costa Rica gambling websites with features you want.

If you, for example, want to see just live casinos for Costa Rica players, you can select the 'Live dealer casinos' box in our list of popular filters. The 'Mobile-friendly casinos' filter will do the same for sites you can enjoy on handheld devices.

Other filters below include 'Payment Method', 'Withdrawal Limit', and 'Currency': all of which let you pinpoint the casinos with your preferred features. The goal is to provide you with a carefully selected list of Costa Rica online gambling sites that meet all your desired criteria.