The Costa Rican cédula jurídica

The format

A cédula jurídica is ten digits, written with hyphens on paper — 3-101-000109 — and stored without them. It is not a random serial: the groups mean something.

• 3A legal person. A 1 here would be a Costa Rican natural person, a 4 a public body.
• 101The kind of body: 101 a sociedad anónima, 102 a sociedad de responsabilidad limitada, and so on.
• 000109The serial within that class.

So the legal form is in the number itself, which is unusual and useful: Vatlas reads the commercial forms out of the middle group and returns them, without a second call.

There is no check digit. A mistyped cédula jurídica cannot be caught offline; it has to be asked about.

Registered, registered of office, deregistered

Holding a cédula jurídica means existing. Charging IVA means being inscrito with Hacienda, which is a separate fact and the one an invoice depends on.

The API answers with a situación: Inscrito for a taxpayer who registered, Inscrito de oficio for one the administration registered on its own initiative, and Desinscrito for one whose registration has ended. It also publishes whether the taxpayer is moroso (in arrears) or omiso (has not filed) — facts about their standing, not about their identity.

Finding the company behind the number

Hacienda's invoicing API

Costa Rica's electronic invoicing is mandatory, and the endpoint every invoicing system in the country calls to check who it is billing is public: api.hacienda.go.cr/fe/ae, keyed by the identification number, no account and no key. A number nobody holds answers with a plain 404.

What the answer does not contain

An address. Not a truncated one — none at all. The service exists to validate an invoice, not to publish a directory, and no address appears anywhere in the payload.

Vatlas says so rather than papering over it: a Costa Rican answer carries a name, a legal form and a status, and every address field is null. That is the register's whole content, and no free source will give you a Costa Rican street address from a cédula jurídica.

Costa Rica-specific pitfalls

• No address, by design. Plan for it rather than treating it as a failed lookup.
• No check digit. A typo can only be caught by asking.
• Ten digits, not twelve. A NITE is quoted with two verification digits on the end; the lookup takes the first ten.
• Existing is not being registered for IVA. The situación is the field that answers that, and Desinscrito is a real and common state.
• A cédula beginning with 4 is a public body, not a company, and has no commercial legal form to report.

One API, inside Europe and out

Vatlas turns a business tax number into a company record: legal name, national identifier, legal form, status and address. Same call, same shape, for a cédula jurídica and for a French VAT number.

curl "https://api.vatlas.dev/v1/lookup/CR3101000109" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VATLAS_KEY"

Response:

200 OK

{
  "data": {
    "vatNumber": "CR3101000109",
    "countryCode": "CR",
    "nationalId": "3101000109",
    "name": "COMP BELLA VISTA",
    "legalForm": "Sociedad Anónima",
    "status": "active",
    "address": {
      "line1": null,
      "line2": null,
      "postalCode": null,
      "city": null,
      "country": "CR"
    }
  },
  "meta": {
    "source": "HACIENDA",
    "sourceDate": "2026-09-13"
  }
}

Costa Rica is asked live rather than imported, so meta.sourceDate is the day of the call. The shape of the response never changes from one country to the next.

Get a free key Read the documentation

Business numbers in other countries

• Peru
• Brazil
• Israel
• Spain
• France
• All countries

Last updated 13 September 2026.