Question:

What happens to the validity of your foreign driver’s license once your application for Costa Rica residency has been approved?

Answer:

Assuming you have not yet homologated your foreign driver’s license (see article – Foreign Driver’s License Homologation How-To), you will have 90 days to do so.

Otherwise, you will need to do a border run for a new 180-day visa stamp in order to keep that foreign driver’s license valid.

Why?

Per the article linked to above, while you were waiting for your submitted application for residency to be approved, the proof of that submission (Expediente), kept your foreign driver’s license valid. The new rules also stated that during that wait time to approval, you were allowed to apply for homologation of your foreign driver’s license.

If you did not take advantage of that new rule, then, upon the occasion of your residency application approval, you now go back to the foreign driver’s license validity being tied to the number of days on your visa stamp. (Legal Residency does not automatically validate your foreign driver’s license.)

If there are few or no days left on that visa stamp, then you will need to get a new one through either a flight out or a border run.

Then once you obtain that fresh 180-day visa stamp, you need to get your foreign driver’s license homologated. Otherwise, even though you have legal residency, you will continue to have to do border runs, 180 days at a time to keep that foreign driver’s license valid.

Question: How long do I have to do this once I receive my residency application approval?

Answer: 90 days.