Is it safe to live in Costa Rica? For most expats and buyers, yes, and the old “Switzerland of Central America” framing is dead anyway. The Organismo de Investigación Judicial recorded 873 homicides in 2025, a rate of 16.7 per 100,000, the third-worst year in the country’s history behind 2023 and 2024. [Organismo de Investigación Judicial, Organismo de Investigación Judicial (OIJ), Poder Judicial de Costa Rica, estadísticas de homicidios, cierre 2025, 2026-01-05] Nearly seven in ten of those killings were drug-trade score-settling concentrated in districts most foreigners never enter. The State Department holds the entire country at Level 2, Exercise Increased Caution. [U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Consular Affairs, U.S. Department of State, Costa Rica Travel Advisory, updated April 2, 2026, 2026-04-02] What that means for a resident is theft management; what it means for a buyer is that the security read and the title read are two separate checks, and this page runs both.
The number the expat blogs are still getting wrong
Costa Rica’s homicide curve broke upward in 2023 and has stayed broken: 905 homicides in 2023, the all-time record, then 876 in 2024 and 873 in 2025. Three consecutive years within four percent of the peak reads as a plateau at a new, higher level. The 2025 figures work out to 2.4 killings per day, with 603 attributed to score-settling between drug-trade actors, 101 to fights and personal disputes, and 53 committed in the course of another crime. Of the 873 victims, OIJ counted 85 as collateral, people who were not the intended target.
Two things follow from that motive breakdown. The violence is real and it is concentrated: a contest between trafficking organizations over cocaine transshipment routes and local retail markets, fought mostly among participants. And it maps to geography tightly enough that a province-level table tells you more than any national rate.
Where the violence sits
OIJ’s 2025 count by province, with the change from 2024:
| Province | Homicides 2025 | vs 2024 |
|---|---|---|
| San José | 293 | +45 |
| Limón | 172 | −9 |
| Puntarenas | 130 | −23 |
| Alajuela | 102 | −4 |
| Guanacaste | 79 | +5 |
| Cartago | 62 | −13 |
| Heredia | 35 | −4 |
Limón’s 172 lands on a population several times smaller than San José’s, which is why the Caribbean port province has carried the country’s worst per-capita numbers through the entire escalation; it is the arrival coast for northbound cocaine. Puntarenas, the Pacific port province, runs second on that basis. San José’s +45 is the line to watch, because it is the one province where the trend still points the wrong way.
Now map the expat destinations onto that table. Tamarindo and Nosara sit in Guanacaste, third-lowest count and a plateaued trend. Santa Teresa sits at the tip of the Nicoya Peninsula, administratively Puntarenas but a five-hour drive from the port districts that generate the province’s numbers. The Pacific vs Caribbean comparison covers how the two coasts differ on everything else; on security data they are not close.
What residents and tourists deal with day to day
Theft, overwhelmingly. Global Affairs Canada’s advisory describes pickpocketing and bag theft as frequent, flags passport theft as a recurring pattern that peaks in high season, and names the hotspots: downtown San José around the Coca-Cola bus terminal, the Jacó, Quepos, Manuel Antonio, and Dominical corridor on the central Pacific, the Puntarenas port area, and Cahuita, Puerto Viejo, and Puerto Limón on the Caribbean side. [Global Affairs Canada, Global Affairs Canada, Costa Rica Travel Advice and Advisories, updated July 29, 2026, 2026-07-29] That list is doing real work: it is an inventory of exactly the places where tourist density meets open access.
The operating rules are unglamorous. Nothing visible in a parked rental car, ever; trailhead and beach lots are the single most reliable place in the country to lose a backpack. Bags stay on your body at bus terminals. Cards over cash, and ATMs inside banks. Violent crime against foreigners exists but is rare enough that the State Department’s advisory frames it as secondary to petty theft, and neither advisory restricts travel to any region of the country.
The buyer check that outranks the crime check
A buyer worried about crime statistics while skipping title verification has the risk ordering backwards. Costa Rica runs a centralized public registry, the Registro Nacional, and every properly titled property has a folio real number you can look up online, showing the registered owner, liens, annotations, and survey plan before you wire anything. [Registro Nacional de Costa Rica, Registro Nacional de Costa Rica, consultas de bienes inmuebles por folio real, 2026-07] An attorney runs this in minutes. If a seller resists a folio real lookup, that is the whole answer.
Beachfront adds a second layer that catches more foreign buyers than any crime ever will: the first 200 meters from the high-tide line is public-domain maritime zone, where “ownership” is at most a municipal concession with foreign-holding caps. The full mechanics, including the scam pattern of concessions marketed as titled land, are in the maritime zone guide, and the end-to-end process lives in how to buy property in Costa Rica.
Who shouldn’t buy or move here
Anyone whose mental model is the Costa Rica of 2015. The country now posts homicide numbers a stone’s throw from Mexico’s national rate, and the correct response is district-level diligence. If you want the numbers to be 10 per 100,000 again before you commit, that is a legitimate position; the data says you will be waiting a while.
Bargain hunters drawn to the southern Caribbean coast who have not priced the security picture. Cahuita and Puerto Viejo are on Global Affairs Canada’s theft list and sit in the province with the country’s heaviest per-capita homicide load. People live there happily; buying there on price alone, sight unseen, is how it goes wrong.
Short-term-rental investors underwriting Jacó nightlife traffic. The same party economy that fills the calendar puts the town on the advisory hotspot lists, and guest-facing theft is an operating cost the projections rarely include. The sober version of that market is in the Jacó guide.
Anyone unwilling to spend one attorney-hour on the folio real and concession status before wiring a deposit. The beach towns are full of buyers who skipped it; some of them are now litigants.
For town-level depth on the safer end of the map, start with Tamarindo, Nosara, and Santa Teresa, and the country overview at Costa Rica.