Living in Panama: safety, healthcare and schools, by the official numbers

Panama recorded 593 homicides in 2025. Of those, 257 were in Panamá province and 121 in Colón, together 64% of the national total. Los Santos province, which contains Pedasí, recorded one. Bocas del Toro recorded seven and Chiriquí, which contains Boquete and David, recorded fourteen.

Those figures come from the Ministerio Público's own statistics centre, they are published monthly, and no English-language page about living in Panama appears to use them. This guide runs the same exercise across the parts of daily life that a foreign resident actually has to arrange: personal safety, healthcare, schooling, money and getting around. Where an institution publishes a number, it is here with its source. Where none does, the page says so instead of estimating.

What it costs to live here is a separate question with separate sources, covered in the cost of living guide.

Key takeaways

• 593 homicides nationally in 2025, up 2% on 583 in 2024. Ministerio Público, Centro de Estadísticas, preliminary figures for 1 January to 31 December 2025.
• The distribution is extremely uneven. Panamá province 257 including San Miguelito's 100, Colón 121, Panamá Oeste 56. Every other province and comarca combined accounted for 59.
• Twenty of the 593 victims were aged 60 or over. The largest group by far was 18 to 24 at 128 victims, and 93.6% of victims were male.
• Foreigners can join the state health system. Panama's trámites portal lists Seguro Voluntario grupo B as open to people not covered by the mandatory regime, foreigners included, on a minimum declared base of B/.300 a month.
• Panama has one Joint Commission International accredited hospital group, Pacífica Salud, accredited since 2011 and affiliated with Johns Hopkins Medicine.
• Private schools must announce fee increases six months before the school year. Decreto Ejecutivo 601, Gaceta Oficial 27822. Nobody can cap the increase itself.

Safety: the honest version, with the data

The question everyone asks is whether Panama is safe. The answer the data supports is that the country's violence is concentrated in a small number of districts, and that those districts are not where foreign buyers live.

• Los Santos1
• Comarca Ngöbe Buglé1
• Comarca Emberá2
• Comarca Guna Yala2
• Herrera5
• Veraguas6
• Bocas del Toro7
• Darién7
• Chiriquí14
• Coclé14
• Panamá Oeste56
• Colón121
• Panamá257

Ministerio Público de Panamá, Centro de Estadísticas · 1 January to 31 December 2025, preliminary · checked August 2026

The Panamá figure includes San Miguelito's 100, which the source lists separately underneath it. Read the chart as counts rather than rates: these are victim numbers, not per-capita figures, and Panamá province holds far more people than Los Santos. Even so, the shape is not subtle. Two provinces account for roughly two thirds of the violence in the country.

The age distribution matters more than the total for most readers of this site. Victims aged 18 to 24 numbered 128, the single largest band. From there the numbers fall steadily with age: 9 victims aged 60 to 64, 6 aged 65 to 69, 4 aged 70 to 74, none aged 75 to 79 and one aged 80 or over. Twenty victims in total were 60 or over, out of 593. Firearms accounted for 518 of the 593, and 555 victims were male.

The year-on-year table in the same report is worth a look before assuming a trend. Nationally 2025 was 2% above 2024. Chiriquí fell 30%, from 20 to 14. Colón fell 2%. Bocas del Toro was unchanged at seven.

None of that makes any place risk-free, and none of it speaks to the crime foreign residents are most likely to meet, which is property crime rather than homicide. We have not found a national property-crime series published to the same standard, so this page does not offer one. What the homicide data does establish is that a single national figure, or a single answer to "is Panama safe", conceals almost everything useful. Ask about a district.

Healthcare: what you can actually join

Panama runs a two-track system, and most guides written for foreigners describe only the private one.

The state system. The Caja de Seguro Social covers employed workers by default. Panama's official trámites portal also lists Seguro Voluntario, with seven categories, and grupo B covers natural persons not subject to the mandatory regime. The requirements for that group name a passport for foreigners, so this route is not closed to foreign residents. The portal states a minimum monthly declared base of B/.300 and a medical examination fee of B/.47.

Treat those two figures with care. Panama passed Ley 462 of March 2025, a substantial reform of the CSS organic law, and published figures for voluntary and independent affiliation currently disagree across sources. The CSS's own site and its affiliation regulations returned errors to us on the check date, so we could not reconcile them against the institution directly. Confirm the current base and rate with CSS before you plan around either number.

The private system. This is what foreign residents mostly use, and the one objective quality marker available is international accreditation. Pacífica Salud, Hospital Punta Pacífica, has held Joint Commission International accreditation since 2011 and is affiliated with Johns Hopkins Medicine. That is the accreditation most US readers will recognise, and it is worth knowing which specific institution holds it rather than accepting the general claim that Panama has world-class healthcare.

On direction of travel: INEC's consumer price index for February 2026 put the health division up 0.2% on the month, with hospitalisation services up 0.7%. Health is one of the divisions rising while the headline index sits flat.

We do not publish private insurance premiums or consultation prices. Those are commercial figures with no institutional series behind them, and every published range we found traces back to a broker or an insurer.

Schools: 536 of them, and one rule worth knowing

Panama had 536 registered private schools in 2025, the highest count since 2020, even though the sector lost roughly 35,919 students over five years.

The rule that matters if you are moving with children is about fees rather than curriculum. Under Decreto Ejecutivo 601, published in Gaceta Oficial 27822, private schools must announce any increase in fees six months before the school year starts. That gives you notice. It does not give you protection, because neither MEDUCA nor the consumer authority ACODECO can regulate the level of the fee itself. The National Assembly has had a bill in front of it to limit increases to once every three years; it had not passed as of our check.

So the practical position is that you will be told in advance and you will pay whatever is announced. Budget for increases rather than assuming stability, and ask any school you are considering for its increase history over the last five years rather than its current price alone.

One more note on the IPC, since it bears directly on this. Education services was the fastest-rising division in February 2026 at 1.3%, with secondary education up 2.1% and infant and primary education up 1.6%.

Money, day to day

Panama is dollarized and the balboa is pegged one to one, so there is no currency risk and no conversion to think about. What there is instead is a banking system that is genuinely hard for non-residents to enter, which is a different problem and one we cover in detail in the banking guide for non-residents. Cash access, withdrawal fees and which networks to avoid are in the ATM guide.

If you are retired and hold Panamanian residency, note that the discount regime under Ley 6 de 1987 is real and wide. It reaches medical consultations, pharmacies, restaurants, public transport, electricity and more. It is also a benefit attached to a status, so it interacts with which residency route you took, which is set out in the residency guide.

Getting around

Panama City has two operating metro lines, with Line 3 not yet in commercial service. Fares are low by any standard, and reduced further for pensioners and students under the same Ley 6 regime.

We are not publishing the fare figures here. The operator's own site would not load from our authoring environment on the check date, and the numbers in circulation come from news outlets and third-party sites rather than from Metro de Panamá. Given that the whole point of this page is that its numbers are checkable, a fare quoted from a secondary source does not belong on it. Check the operator directly.

Outside the capital a car is not optional. That makes the licence conversion a first-month errand rather than a later one, and the moving guide covers what the ATTT asks for and why the 90 days you have read about elsewhere is probably shorter than you think.

Who Panama suits, and who it doesn't

It suits people who will choose a district deliberately. Almost every number on this page varies more between provinces than it does between Panama and another country. Someone who picks Boquete, Pedasí or Coronado on the basis of research is buying a genuinely different daily life from someone who picks an address in Panama City because it was in a brochure.

It suits people who want a short flight home. That is not a statistic we can source, but it is the reason a large share of North American residents give, and it is structural rather than fashionable.

It does not suit people who need the state to be predictable. The CSS reform is a live example: a major law passed in March 2025 and the published figures for joining the system still disagree in August 2026. That pattern recurs, and if you find it intolerable in a country you are moving to, it is better to know now.

It does not suit people who will not learn Spanish. Every source on this page is published in Spanish only. So are the tariff sheets, the customs rules, the residency requirements and the school fee notices. English-language coverage of all of it is thin, frequently out of date, and the reason this site exists.

When the honest answer is don't

Do not decide anything from a national safety figure. Not ours either. The gap between Los Santos at one homicide and Panamá province at 257 is the whole point, and any page that answers "is Panama safe" with a single yes or no has thrown away the only useful information.

Do not assume the state health system is closed to you. The voluntary route exists and is cheap by the standards of private cover. It is also slower and more limited than private care. The mistake is not choosing private; the mistake is never learning that a choice existed.

Do not move mid school year on the assumption you will sort out fees later. The six-month notice rule means a school's next increase is often already published when you enrol. Ask for it.

Do not treat this page as a substitute for visiting. Everything here is checkable from a desk, which is exactly its limitation. Humidity, noise, traffic, how far the nearest hospital really is at eight in the morning, and whether you like the people are not in any government dataset.

What we have not verified

Property crime. We could not find a national series for theft, burglary or robbery published to the same standard as the homicide reports, so this page carries no figure for the category of crime foreign residents are most likely to encounter.

Per-capita homicide rates by province. The Ministerio Público publishes counts, not rates. Converting them would mean pairing them with census population by province, which is a calculation rather than a source, so we have shown the counts as published and said so.

Current CSS contribution figures. Ley 462 of March 2025 reformed the CSS organic law. The trámites portal states a B/.300 base and a B/.47 examination fee for Seguro Voluntario; other published figures disagree, and the CSS's own site and affiliation regulations returned HTTP errors to us on the check date.

Metro and Metrobús fares. The operator's site was unreachable from our environment and we do not publish transport fares from news reports.

Private healthcare and insurance prices, and school fees in dollars. All commercial, none published as an institutional series. The IPC gives the direction of travel and nothing about the level, and that is all this page claims.

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