San José, Costa Rica · Number-plate driving ban
Official name Restricción Vehicular mediante el Esquema Hora/Placa en el Centro de San José
Not in force in San José right nowTuesday, 13 October 2026 at 03:05 · America/Costa Rica
Starts Tuesday, 13 October 2026 at 06:00 local time.
MOPT does not exempt public holidays automatically: article 10 lets it suspend the restriction by administrative resolution for year-end, Holy Week, school breaks and public holidays, one dated period at a time. The timetable above is what the decree says and does not know whether a suspension is running. The resolution recorded against article 10 on 15 September 2026, RES-MOPT-DM-0963-2026 of 10 September 2026, suspends the restriction for the whole of 15 September, 1 December and 25 December 2026 — the obligatory public holidays. SINALEVI overwrites that note rather than accumulating it (it previously held 13-17 July 2026), so this is the current list, it is not exhaustive of the year, and it will be replaced.
Which of these cases is yours depends on the last digit of your plate, which we do not know. Only one pair of digits is barred on any given day; every other plate is free to drive.
A hire car owned by a rent-a-car company is exempt from all of it, and so is any motorcycle. The timetable above is the rule, not your answer.
A private car carrying four or more people is exempt between 06:00 and 08:00 and between 16:30 and 19:00, which the timetable cannot express.
Operating times only, read from the source below. It does not check your vehicle.
Central San José closes to one pair of plate endings every weekday. Between 06:00 and 19:00, Monday to Friday, a car whose plate ends in that day's two digits may not drive inside the ring formed by the Circunvalación and two La Uruca routes — there is no charge that buys you in.
The exemption that matters most to a visitor is the one the decree spells out: cars owned by rent-a-car companies are exempt outright, and the driver proves it by showing the hire company's title to the traffic police. Motorcycles are exempt too, and any private car carrying four or more people is exempt between 06:00 and 08:00 and between 16:30 and 19:00.
MOPT suspends the whole thing by resolution over holidays and school breaks, which is why a date matters as much as a plate here: the resolution in force as we read the decree on 15 September 2026 lifts the restriction for the full 24 hours on three public holidays — 15 September, 1 December and 25 December 2026.
Procuraduría General de la República — SINALEVI (Sistema Nacional de Legislación Vigente), Decreto Ejecutivo 37370-MOPT, consolidated text, version 20 of 20
Nothing is charged and nothing can be paid. The decree bans the day, it does not price it: no payment makes a restricted plate legal between 06:00 and 19:00, and no payment is needed on any of the other four weekdays.
06:00 to 19:00, Monday to Friday, by the last digit of the plate: 1 or 2 on Monday, 3 or 4 on Tuesday, 5 or 6 on Wednesday, 7 or 8 on Thursday, 9 or 0 on Friday (article 3).
The decree heads that table "para vehículos que no sean de carga con un peso inferior al tipo C2+ (6 toneladas)" — goods vehicles above that class are governed by a separate regulation, Decreto Ejecutivo 38238-MOPT, whose own hours and routes table is not reproduced in the consolidated text.
Article 10 lets MOPT suspend the restriction by administrative resolution over year-end, Holy Week, school breaks and public holidays; the one recorded against article 10 in the consolidated text on 15 September 2026 is RES-MOPT-DM-0963-2026 of 10 September 2026, which lifts the restriction for the whole twenty-four hours of three obligatory public holidays — 15 September, 1 December and 25 December 2026.
SINALEVI replaces that note rather than appending to it: the same slot previously held RES-MOPT-DM-0700-2026 of 3 July 2026 (13-17 July 2026), and that earlier suspension is gone from the text, so this is the current list and not a cumulative one.
Procuraduría General de la República — SINALEVI, Decreto Ejecutivo 37370-MOPT, articles 3 and 10, consolidated text version 20 of 20
Article 4 draws the area with three national routes rather than a list of streets: the Bulevar de Circunvalación (Ruta Nacional 39), the Radial La Uruca (Ruta Nacional 108) and the Carretera La Uruca–Calle Blancos (Ruta Nacional 100). The restriction covers those routes themselves, the roads running from them into central San José and back out again, and the whole of the area those three routes enclose once joined up.
So the Circunvalación is inside the scheme, not a way around it.
Procuraduría General de la República — SINALEVI, Decreto Ejecutivo 37370-MOPT, article 4, consolidated text version 20 of 20
There is no emission threshold to meet. This scheme keys off the last digit of the number plate and, for goods vehicles, off weight class — never off what comes out of the exhaust. A brand-new car and a twenty-year-old one lose the same weekday.
Not applicable, for the same reason as the petrol standard: the plate decides, not the fuel.
Corte Suprema de Justicia, Consejo Superior — Circular 220-2025, the annual update of traffic fines under article 148 of Ley 9078, published in SINALEVI
Procuraduría General de la República — SINALEVI, Decreto Ejecutivo 37370-MOPT, articles 3, 6 and 10, consolidated text version 20 of 20
Procuraduría General de la República — SINALEVI, Decreto Ejecutivo 37370-MOPT (consolidated text, version 20 of 20)
Procuraduría General de la República — SINALEVI, consolidated text of Decreto 37370-MOPT as its own site loads it (the endpoint we monitor). Version 20 of 20 was read in full on 15 September 2026 and diffed line by line against version 19, which is the reading the four previous cycles deferred. The two versions are identical except for article 10: SINALEVI replaced the Sinalevi note recording RES-MOPT-DM-0700-2026 (13-17 July 2026) with one recording RES-MOPT-DM-0963-2026 of 10 September 2026 (15 September, 1 December and 25 December 2026, full twenty-four hours). Everything else — the 06:00-19:00 band, the five plate pairs, the three national routes of article 4, the article 6 exemptions, the article 9 penalty pointer — is word for word what version 19 said, so the rule itself did not change and the record's other fields stand as measured. Note what this cost: the six strings below were all present in version 20 on 14 September, and their presence was read as "the publisher merely reissued the text". They could not have said otherwise, because none of them watched article 10 — the one place that moved. The last two strings are that gap closed
Procuraduría General de la República — SINALEVI, which version of Decreto 37370-MOPT is currently in force (the endpoint we monitor). This watch is a version pointer rather than a fact: it asserts that the latest consolidated version is still the one the record was written from. It did its job on 14 September 2026, reporting broken the day the publisher rotated 151811 to 152345. When it next fires, re-read the whole text and diff it against the version the record cites — do not settle for re-checking the strings already listed above. Those strings can only report that the things we already knew are still true; the publisher rotates the version precisely because something we were not watching has moved, and on 14 September that something was a suspension covering a date five days away
Corte Suprema de Justicia, Consejo Superior — Circular 220-2025, traffic fines from 1 January 2026 (SINALEVI)
Corte Suprema de Justicia — Circular 220-2025 as SINALEVI loads it (the endpoint we monitor)
Next scheduled re-check: 2026-12-08.
A city can run more than one scheme, and they do not always answer the same question.