Moving to Panama: landing your pets, your furniture and your licence

Landing one dog in Panama costs B/.65 in cash at Tocumen airport, and the Ministry of Health can require you to keep that dog inside your own property for the next forty days. Panama's national quarantine for small animals dates to a 1970 decree and has never been repealed. What changed is that you are now allowed to serve it at home.

Moving here is four separate government problems: your pets, your household goods, your vehicle, and your right to drive. Four different authorities handle them, each publishes its own fee sheet, and none of the sheets mentions the others. This guide takes them one at a time with the figure and the document each authority actually asks for. Residency is a fifth problem with its own thresholds, covered in the residency guide.

Key takeaways

• Government fees for one dog are B/.65, all in cash. MIDA charges B/.10 for the import licence and B/.15 per animal for inspection; MINSA charges B/.40 per animal. Joint MIDA/MINSA requirements sheet for Tocumen, updated March 2026.
• Strict home quarantine costs B/.130 instead of B/.40, and the undertaking runs forty days. The animal stays within your property and away from other domestic and wild animals for the whole period. MINSA Compromiso de Cuarentena Domiciliaria, under Decreto 1132 de 1970 and Resolución Ministerial 183 de 2001.
• Any foreigner proving they are coming to live here may import B/.25,000 of used household goods with no tax. Decreto de Gabinete 41 de 11 de diciembre de 2002, Article 216, Gaceta Oficial 24,700.
• The pensionado household-goods benefit is B/.10,000, which is the smaller of the two. Ley 9 de 24 de junio de 1987, Article 2, numeral 1.
• Ley 9's import benefits are closed to holders of an immigrant visa. Article 9. Read literally, that is a problem for anyone getting residency by buying property.
• A foreign driving licence is treated as good for 90 days. A US or Canadian passport buys 180 days as a tourist. The two numbers do not match and the shorter one is the licence.

Your pets: the quarantine nobody mentions

Start with what it costs. These are the published government fees at Tocumen, and every one of them is payable in cash.

• MIDA import licence (per species)$10
• MIDA veterinary inspection (per animal)$15
• MINSA entry and inspection (per animal)$40
• MINSA strict home quarantine (per animal)$130

MIDA/MINSA joint requirements sheet for Tocumen International Airport, updated March 2026 · checked August 2026

The last two are alternatives rather than additions. Standard entry is B/.40 per animal. Where strict home quarantine is required, the figure is B/.130 instead. So one dog lands for B/.65 in the ordinary case and B/.155 in the other, and a second dog of the same species adds B/.55, because the MIDA import licence is charged once per species rather than per animal.

The forty days

MINSA's home-quarantine undertaking is a signed commitment, and it is specific. Keep the animal within the grounds of your home for forty days. Prevent contact with domestic or wild species for the whole of that period. Keep the animal's environment clean, follow a vet's immunisation programme, and report any behavioural change to the Departamento de Control de Zoonosis. A MINSA veterinarian monitors the animal according to the epidemiological risk.

That is the part worth planning around. Plenty of people arrive into a hotel or a short-term rental while they house-hunt, which is exactly the situation the undertaking does not fit. If you are bringing an animal, the housing decision stops being flexible.

What the published sheets do not say is when strict quarantine gets imposed rather than the ordinary B/.40 entry. We could not find a rule for that in any MINSA or MIDA document, so budget B/.155 per animal and plan accommodation that can hold an animal for forty days. Being wrong in that direction costs nothing. Our guide to moving to Panama with pets has the forms, the vaccination list by species, the February 2026 decree that reset these fees, and what the arrival at Tocumen actually involves.

The document chain, and where it breaks

Panama wants an official Certificado Zoosanitario de Exportación issued by the sanitary authority of the country you are leaving, apostilled by that country's foreign ministry or consularised at a Panamanian diplomatic office, with a maximum of thirty days since issue. In the United States that certificate is the international health certificate issued by a USDA-accredited veterinarian and endorsed by APHIS, which then goes for apostille or to a Panamanian consulate.

The thirty days is the trap. It runs from issue, not from the date the certificate finally comes back stamped, and the legalisation step sits inside the window. Several widely-read relocation guides quote a ten-day certificate window for Panama, which is a US-side convention rather than Panama's rule. Panama's own sheet says thirty days from issue, and the binding constraint is that those thirty days must still be running when the animal lands.

The vaccinations Panama requires, from the same sheet:

• Dogs: rabies, distemper, hepatitis, leptospirosis, parvovirus
• Cats: rabies, feline viral rhinotracheitis, feline calicivirus, feline panleukopenia
• Ferrets: rabies

Rabies must have been given from three months of age and at least thirty days before travel; in adult animals the vaccines simply have to be in date. The vaccination card has to show dates, brand, lot number and expiry, and the endo- and ectoparasite treatments given before shipping. The animal must have no fresh or healing wounds. That last one is in the sheet, and it is there because it gets used. Legal basis is Decreto Ejecutivo 305 de 3 de octubre de 2001.

Notify MINSA three to five working days ahead by emailing the entry application, the export certificate and the vaccination card to cam@minsa.gob.pa. On arrival you present yourself at two offices at Tocumen, MIDA's agricultural quarantine office and MINSA's zoonosis control office.

If the paperwork is incomplete, the sheet is blunt about the consequence: the animal is retained, or returned to its country of origin on the airline that brought it. Ley 23 de 1997, article 39, and Decreto 1132 de 1970, article 16.

Two practical notes that come straight off MINSA's own procedure sheets. MINSA's 2013 zoonosis sheet says pets arriving at weekends or on public holidays stay in the airport kennels until the next working day, while the March 2026 airport sheet gives the zoonosis section as open Monday to Sunday. Both are still published, so a weekday arrival removes a risk rather than settling the question. And the English-language version of the Tocumen requirements sheet still carries old MIDA fees of $6.00 and $10.00 and omits the MINSA line entirely. Work from the Spanish sheet.

Your household goods: B/.25,000, and the smaller retiree version

Article 216 of Decreto de Gabinete 41 de 2002 is short and does the whole job. Foreigners who prove they are coming to establish domicile in the country, and Panamanians who have lived abroad for at least two years and are returning, may bring in their household furniture and other used household objects up to B/.25,000 of customs value with no tax paid on the import. It does not apply to temporary returns that are not a permanent move.

Nothing in that article is limited to retirees. It is the general regime, and it is the larger of the two available.

The pensionado benefit sold alongside Panama's retirement visa is a different and smaller thing:

So the special retiree benefit is smaller on the ceiling and narrower on the taxes it relieves. Relocation pages routinely list it as a reason to take the pensionado route without mentioning that the ordinary customs allowance is two and a half times larger.

There is a second catch in the same law, and it is bigger. Article 9 of Ley 9 says foreigners who have been granted an immigrant visa cannot claim its benefits, other than people who retired from service in the Canal Area. To use them, an applicant has to renounce the immigrant visa in writing and apply for the Visa de Turista Pensionado instead. Read literally, that excludes the property-based residency routes, which is to say the people most likely to be shipping a container.

Article 3 adds the resale rule. Anything imported under the tariff franchise cannot be sold, rented, pledged or judicially auctioned without paying the taxes that would have been due. For household and personal articles the tax falls away if the sale happens more than three years after the exemption date. The vehicle gets no such release in the text.

On that vehicle: Ley 9 gives a pensionado a total tariff franchise every two years on one motor vehicle for personal or family use. Franquicia arancelaria is the import duty and nothing else. Panama's own trámite page for these exonerations still shows the 5% impuesto selectivo al consumo and 7% ITBMS as payable on the vehicle. The franchise covers the duty. The consumption tax and the ITBMS remain, so the benefit marketed as importing a car tax free every two years describes only part of the bill.

Customs clearance itself is not a self-service process. A licensed Agente Corredor de Aduana, a customs broker, has to file the destination for you.

Your driving licence: the 90 days you may not have

Every source on this repeats the same figure. A foreigner may drive in Panama on a foreign licence for 90 days, usually explained as matching the tourist stay. The explanation is wrong for this site's main audience. US and Canadian citizens get 180 days as tourists, under Resolución 22068 de 1 de septiembre de 2021, so the driving privilege runs out roughly halfway through a legal stay.

The second thing to know is that residency ends the privilege early. Once your carné de migración is issued, the foreign licence stops being sufficient even if you arrived last week. The Panamanian licence is not a thing to get around to.

Converting one is cheap and mostly administrative. The ATTT charges B/.40 in cash, which covers the visual and hearing checks. There is no theory or practical test on this route, for categories A, B, C and D. What it takes:

• A valid carné de migración, original and copy. This is the requirement that makes the licence a post-residency errand rather than a pre-residency one.
• A valid passport, original and copy.
• Your valid foreign licence, plus a certified copy of both sides. Certification is by apostille if your country is in the Hague Convention, or by your embassy or consulate with the certification then authenticated at Panama's Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores.
• A blood-type certificate from a laboratory the ATTT recognises, no more than six months old, unless your existing licence already states it.
• A translation by an authorised interpreter in Panama if the documents are not in Spanish.

One detail that catches people who took a provisional permit. The Panamanian licence issued to a foreign resident tracks the validity of the migration card rather than running the standard four years. Friendly Nations is a two-year provisional permit before permanence, as the residency guide sets out, so the first licence is short and you renew it alongside the residency. Our guide to driving licences for foreigners covers the branch process.

When the honest answer is don't

Do not ship a container to use up an allowance. B/.25,000 of headroom is not a reason to fill it. Expat accounts of this move say the same three things over and over: leather, books and softwood furniture that were fine in a dry climate do not last long in a humid one; a large share of rentals here come furnished, so a container narrows the housing search at the moment you least want it narrowed; and a documentation error leaves everything in a port warehouse accruing storage by the day. Ship what you would miss and buy the rest.

Do not budget for the pensionado import benefits if you are getting residency by buying property. Article 9 is the reason, and it is the kind of thing that surfaces after the container is on the water. Ask your attorney to confirm in writing which regime your permit qualifies for before you book a shipment.

Do not fly an animal in on a Saturday if you can avoid it. MINSA's older sheet has weekend and holiday arrivals waiting in the airport kennels until the next working day. The March 2026 sheet gives seven-day hours, and both documents are live. A weekday landing costs nothing to arrange.

Do not leave the licence to day 89. The apostille or consular certification of your home licence is a mail-and-wait process, and it is easier to start it in your own country while you still live there.

Do not buy a car abroad to import it on the strength of the exemption. The duty is waived and the consumption tax and ITBMS are not, and the vehicle carries a resale restriction the household goods eventually shed.

What we have not verified

The six-month deadline. Almost every page on menaje de casa says household goods must be imported within six months of obtaining residency. That deadline does not appear in Article 216, and we could not find a citation for it anywhere. It may well exist in a customs resolution we have not located. Treat it as real and confirm it with your broker, but do not take the six months from us.

The 90-day driving figure. Repeated everywhere, cited by nobody, including the law firms that publish it. We could not trace it to a law, decree or ATTT resolution. The safe reading is that it is at most 90 days and possibly less.

When strict home quarantine applies. The published sheets price it and describe it without saying who gets it.

Whether Article 9 still bites the way it reads. Ley 9 was written under the 1960 migration framework, which Decreto Ley 3 de 2008 replaced, and the category names changed with it. The exclusion is plainly in the text. How customs applies it to a modern residency permit is a question for an attorney, not for us.

The APHIS page. We could not load the USDA APHIS page for Panama from our authoring environment, so the US-side procedure above is stated only to the level Panama's own sheet requires. Check APHIS directly for the current US steps.

We also publish no container price. Every figure available is a commercial quote from a company that wants the job, and there is no institutional source to check it against.

Frequently asked questions