Guide · Costa Rica
How to check the status of a case file in Costa Rica, step by step
How the Costa Rican case number is read, what the Judiciary's public lookup answers, what it does not answer and where search by party name actually lives. Updated in September 2026.
What the Sistema de Gestión en Línea is
The Sistema de Gestión en Línea is the portal through which the Judiciary of Costa Rica publishes the status of case files. Its public lookup answers with no username and no password: there is no account to create, nothing to pay and no robot check.
The way in is the case number. With it, the portal returns the file's detail, its status, the office it sits in today and the list of rulings issued. Without it there is no way in: the only search by party name that exists lives in another system — the Archivo Judicial — and answers a different question.
For a lawyer that splits the work in two: the file you already carry is followed by its number, and the background of a person or a company is searched by name in the archive. This guide explains both lookups and says, without dressing it up, what each one returns and what it leaves out.
How a case number is read
The Costa Rican number says rather more than its neighbors': beyond identifying the file it encodes the year, the office where it was opened and the subject matter. It has four parts separated by hyphens, and one of them misleads.
AA-NNNNNN-NNNN-MM
- AA — the year
- Two digits for the year the file was opened: 23 for 2023, 25 for 2025. Only two, unlike the four-digit year other countries in the region use, so a 1999 number and a 2099 one are written the same way.
- NNNNNN — the sequential
- Six digits, zero-padded, for the order in which the file came in that year. It is not a national counter: it is kept per office, which is why the number always carries the office next to it. Two files from two different offices can share a sequential without being the same file.
- NNNN — the office
- Four digits for the judicial office where the file was opened. It is the origin, and that is the trap: a transferred file keeps in its number the office where it was born, while the office it sits in today is only known by looking up its status. Confusing the two is how you lose track of a file the day it moves.
- MM — the subject matter
- Two letters for the subject matter. The ones the public lookup recognizes are CI for civil, LA for labor, PE for criminal, CJ for debt collection, TR for traffic, AG for agrarian, CA for administrative litigation, FC for petty offenses, S1 for the first chamber and CO for the Sala Constitucional.
A mistyped number almost never fails with a clear error: the portal answers an empty list, which reads exactly like «it does not exist». That is why it is worth double-checking the year, the sequential and the office before concluding that a case file is not there.
The lookup, step by step
These are the steps of the Judiciary's public lookup, with what is worth looking at in each one.
Gather the full number
Without it the lookup does not start, because the Sistema de Gestión en Línea does not search by name. The whole number — year, sequential, office and subject matter — is the only thing that identifies the file, and a missing part cannot be guessed from the portal.
Open the public case lookup
You get there from the Judiciary's portal, at pjenlinea.poder-judicial.go.cr. It asks for no username and no password: the public lookup identifies itself against the system and answers any visitor, from a computer or from a phone.
Type the number and search
The lookup resolves against the office the number itself declares. If the file exists, the portal returns its detail; if not, it returns an empty list. That empty list is the only reliable way to read «it does not exist», because the text message is the same for a file that is not there and for one that is there with nothing to show.
Open the file's status
The status does not come in the first answer: the portal returns it in a second read, chained to the detail the first one brought. That is where the status description shows up, the date it was set, whether the file is in circulation, the current location with its history and the people assigned by their type of post.
Go through the rulings
It is the separate list that says what was issued and when, with each ruling's identifier. A file with no rulings and a file that does not exist answer the same thing, so it is in the previous step that you check which of the two you are looking at.
What the lookup returns
A case file looked up by its number returns this:
The identification: the number with its hyphenated format, the internal folder the system files it under and the check digit, which travels as a separate field and not inside the number.
The status, with its description written as the court recorded it and the exact date it was set.
Whether the file is in circulation, and whether what you are looking at is the file itself or one of its annexes.
The current location and its history, which is where a transfer between offices shows up along with the decision that ordered it.
The people assigned, each one by their type of post: deciding judge, processing judge.
The amount in dispute and the list of rulings, each with its identifier and its date.
What the official lookup does not do
The portal is complete for what exists, and it is worth knowing where it stops.
It does not notify. There is no email, no notification and no subscription to a case file: whoever wants to hear about a new ruling has to go back in and look.
It does not keep your list. Every lookup starts from scratch, so carrying twenty case files means typing twenty numbers every time.
It does not search by name. That search lives in the Archivo Judicial (the judicial archive), which is another system, and returns case files that have already gone to the archive: good for a background, not for a live caseload. And a common company name answers with tens of thousands of rows at once, unpaginated, so the criteria have to be narrow.
It does not open confidential files. A case file the system does not mark as open to public citizen lookup is not shown from the outside, and that is a decision of the system and of the law.
It publishes no terms of use and no disclaimer about what it shows. We looked for them on 10 September 2026 and the portal does not have them, so this guide does not quote a disclaimer that does not exist.
The first two limits are the ones that get expensive with volume: the portal does not notify and does not remember, so hearing in time depends on somebody going in every day. That is exactly what can be automated.
See how the automatic watch worksFrequently asked questions about looking up case files in Costa Rica
Does looking up a case file cost anything?
No. The public lookup of the Sistema de Gestión en Línea is free: it answers with no account, no payment and no robot check.
Do I need to create an account?
To look up, no. The part of the system where a lawyer manages their own files and receives service is another matter, and that one does ask you to identify yourself; the public lookup does not touch it and needs nothing from it.
Why does the office in the number not match where the file is?
Because they are two different things. The four digits in the number are the office where the file was opened, and they never change; the office it sits in today is stated by the status, and that does change on a transfer. We checked it on a real file: the number declared one office and the status another, both with the same court name.
How often is the information updated?
The status carries the date it was set, and that mark is what moves when the court records something. In practice a change shows up when the court records it, not when it is issued, so more than a day can pass between the two.
Looking it up is easy. Remembering every day is not.
Custodio Legal checks the portal for each of your case files every day and tells you when the status changes or a new ruling appears, with the source next to it. Create your free account, no card.