Can You Use U.S. Dollars in Costa Rica—Or Should I Basically Plan On Becoming a Mathematician?

Ahhh, yes, the sound of brains exploding as they try like hell to figure out how much 55.394,00 colones is. (For the record, Costa Ricans swap the decimal for a comma—that wasn't a typo!)

Before anybody has a seizure, let me just tell you really quickly that you are going to be THRILLED when I tell you that you can use U.S. dollars in Costa Rica—as long as you aren't in the middle of the jungle making an exchange with the Boruca indigenous folks.

However, here's the catch.

Whichever fine establishment you happen to be visiting, it's they who gets to decide the exchange rate. They most likely won't use the official exchange rate: they'll add some profit on top, because this is considered a service here. But it's okay! It's worth it, if you've got dollah dollah bills and want life to be easy.

That said, if you want to change your money and get the official rate, you can just hit up a bank—and then you'll be flush with colones. Otherwise, all you need to do is go to any ATM. At the ATM, you can use your foreign debit card to pull out cash in either dollars or colones. This is what we do. And here's a little currency exchange #PROTIP for you, so your brain doesn't actually explode, because we definitely don't want that: to get a rough estimate when converting Costa Rican colones to U.S. dollars, just think: double.

500 colones = $1
1,000 colones = $2
5,000 colones = $10
10,000 colones = $20
20,000 colones = $40
50,000 colones = $100

That's not exact math, but it's a quick and easy way to figure it out easily in your head and get a pretty close ball park. :) AND HEY, WE LOVE SHORTCUTS. And ball park franks. Wait, why are we talking about hot dogs? This escalated fast.