Costa Rica ID number validator

In Costa Rica every person and every company is identified by a number. Citizens carry a cédula de identidad, the national identity card; companies and associations have a cédula jurídica, their legal-entity number; foreign residents hold a DIMEX, the identity document issued to foreigners who live in the country; and people or entities that need a tax number without having any of these receive a NITE from Hacienda, the Costa Rican tax authority. This tool checks whether the number in front of you matches the format of one of them, tells you which one it is and gives it back in two versions: digits only, and written the way Costa Ricans usually write it. It is useful when you hire staff, onboard a supplier or issue an electronic invoice in Costa Rica, so a mistyped number does not travel any further. It checks the format, not the registry: a well-formed number does not prove that it exists or that it belongs to whoever gave it to you.

The four kinds of Costa Rican ID and how to tell them apart

The formats come from the Dirección General de Tributación, Costa Rica's tax administration, which publishes them in Anexos y Estructuras version 4.4, its technical document for electronic invoices, and the tool applies them as written. A personal cédula has 9 digits and never starts with zero; it is written in three groups, as in 1-0234-0567. A cédula jurídica has 10 characters: one digit for the type, three for the class and six for the sequential number, as in 3-101-123456.

A DIMEX has 11 or 12 digits, does not start with zero either, and is written as a single block without hyphens. A NITE also has 10 digits, like a cédula jurídica; the tool tells the two apart by the opening digits that only a NITE uses. You can paste the number however you have it, with hyphens, spaces or dots.

If a personal cédula comes with an extra zero in front, as some systems write it, the tool drops that zero and returns the usual 9 digits. If the number has been shortened by leaving out the padding zeros inside each group, it comes up short and fails, so complete it exactly as it appears on the card.

Reading the result: four real examples

Enter 1-0234-0567 and the answer is a valid format, a personal cédula, digits-only form 102340567 and hyphenated form 1-0234-0567. Enter 3-101-123456 and the format is that of a cédula jurídica, stored as 3101123456 without hyphens. Enter 155812345678, which has 12 digits, and the tool recognizes a DIMEX and leaves it as it is, because that document is not written with hyphens.

Enter 12-345 and the answer is not valid: its 5 characters do not match any Costa Rican identification. If you already know what you expect to receive, you can say so. When you ask a supplier for its cédula jurídica and the person types their own personal cédula instead, the format is fine but it is not what you asked for, and the tool flags it rather than accepting it.

Keeping the digits-only form means the same number is always stored the same way in your payroll, your invoicing software or your customer list, so a stray hyphen or space never makes two identical numbers look different.

What a valid format cannot tell you

None of these numbers carries a check digit; the official sources do not define one. That has a practical consequence worth knowing. If someone mistypes a digit or swaps two of them, the number keeps the right length and the format stays valid, so no format check can catch that mistake.

A valid result tells you the number is well formed. It does not tell you that the number exists, that it is current or that it belongs to the person or company that gave it to you. For that you need the body that issues it: the civil registry of the Tribunal Supremo de Elecciones, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, for individuals; the Registro Nacional, the national registry, for legal entities; the Dirección General de Migración y Extranjería, the immigration office, for a DIMEX; and Hacienda for tax registrations.

When you hire someone or register a client, compare the number with the original document and keep the clean form the tool gives you.

An announced change to the cédula jurídica

The last six characters of a cédula jurídica, its sequential number, are due to become alphanumeric; an example of the new form is 3-101-A00001. The fourth quarter of 2026 has been mentioned as the target date, but we could not confirm it in an official source, so do not treat it as final. The tool already accepts a letter in that position, so a new legal-entity number will not be rejected by mistake.

If your invoicing or payroll software only allows digits in that part of the number, it is worth checking before the first ones appear. For anything unusual, such as a foreign document or an entity that fits none of these formats, the institution that issues the document, or your accountant in Costa Rica, has the final word.