Enter your salary, seniority, and reason for leaving, and see what severance pay you would be entitled to, item by item.
Figures in effect since January 1, 2026.
Fill out the form and press "Calculate" to see the breakdown of your estimated severance.
It depends on your tenure and on why you are leaving. The Labour Code sets a table of days of salary per year worked (art. 29(3)), with a cap: the compensation does not exceed the last 8 years of the relationship (art. 29(4)), and the base is not your current salary but the average of your last six months (art. 30(b)). That cap belongs to the ordinary private-sector regime: some public-sector collective agreements carry higher ones. The rate per year rises up to a point of tenure and then falls, so more years do not always mean more days.
As a rule no: severance arises in some reasons for leaving and not in others, and a voluntary resignation does not trigger it, nor notice pay. What is paid is what you already earned: pending vacation, the aguinaldo for the period and salary for the current month. The MTSS official calculator also contemplates «resignation with employer liability»; when it applies and what it triggers is a legal question this page does not settle.
There are three tiers and it does not grow beyond the third: one week between three and six months of tenure, fifteen days from six months up to a year, and one month from then on (Labour Code, art. 28(a), (b) and (c)). The article applies after continuous work of no less than three months. At two years or at twenty, notice is still one month. If the employer does not give it, they pay it in cash, without prejudice to severance.
Severance is exempt from income tax (Law 7092, art. 35(c)) and so is the statutory aguinaldo (art. 35(b)); notice pay gets the same treatment as compensation under the Labour Code, even though the statute does not name it. Vacation pay is not: art. 35 is a closed list that does not include it, so it is taxed even when collected inside the final settlement. How it is treated for CCSS contributions is under legal review.
Not unilaterally. Notice is a mutual obligation (Labour Code, art. 28): if the worker skips it the employer may claim it, but under criteria from the MTSS legal affairs directorate (DAJ-AER-OFP-200-2018, 308-2018 and DAJ-AE-194-12) they cannot deduct it from the settlement and have thirty days to claim it before the Labour Courts. These are the ministry’s administrative criteria, not the wording of the statute.