Is Ozempic available in Costa Rica? What the registry says

Yes — and so are four others

Ozempic holds Costa Rican sanitary registration and is carried by national distributors in both of its presentations. It is not the only one. Checked in October 2026 against the Ministry of Health registry and distributor catalogues:

• Ozempic (semaglutide) — registered, both presentations stocked by a national distributor
• Wegovy (semaglutide, the higher-dose weight-management presentation) — on sale
• Saxenda (liraglutide, daily rather than weekly) — stocked
• Mounjaro (tirzepatide) — on sale through retail pharmacy chains
• Norditropin (somatropin) — stocked, though this is growth hormone, not a GLP‑1

Testosterone undecanoate is separately registered for male hypogonadism. The picture is better supplied than most people assume, and considerably better supplied than it was three years ago.

Why the registration number is the thing to ask for

Availability is not the useful question. The useful question is whether the box in front of you entered the country by the registered route.

A medicine with Costa Rican sanitary registration has been assessed by the Ministry of Health, is imported by a licensed distributor, and travels under a cold chain that somebody is accountable for. The GLP‑1 medicines are peptides in solution. They are temperature-sensitive, and a pen that has been warm is not a cheaper pen, it is a weaker one. You cannot see this. Neither can your doctor.

That is why the Ministry of Health's 2025 warning requires patients to be told the brand, the active ingredient and the registration number. Those three facts together mean the cold chain has a documented owner.

What a registered product costs, and why

Prices vary by pharmacy and by dose, and they move. Published retail prices for tirzepatide in Costa Rica during 2026 ran from roughly ₡150,000 at the starting dose to about ₡210,000 at the higher doses, per monthly pen. Semaglutide starting doses have been advertised from around ₡50,000. Treat any figure, including these, as a snapshot: these are imported products priced against a moving exchange rate.

What does not move is the structure. The medicine is dispensed by a pharmacy and paid for there. A clinic that folds the cost of the drug into its own monthly fee has quietly made every prescription a sale, and that is the arrangement a regulator looks at first.

What is not registered

The Ministry of Health has issued alerts naming products that do not hold registration, among them several SARMs — ostarine, testolone, ibutamoren, stenabol — and a counterfeit testosterone product. Separately, retatrutide, tesamorelin, BPC‑157, TB‑500 and GHK‑Cu are named as unregistered peptides.

These circulate. They are sold online, often with "research use only" printed on the vial, which is the legal wording that allows them to be sold at all. That phrase is not a technicality. It means no regulator has assessed the contents, the dose, or the sterility.

The practical answer

If a physician assesses you, prescribes through Receta Digital, and you collect the medicine from a pharmacy that can show you a registration number, you are on the registered route. If a product arrives by courier with a code number on the label, you are not, whatever the website said.