We present a vertically tapered InGaAsP/InP planar buried heterostructure (PBH) laser for low loss coupling to single-mode fibers. To achieve the vertical tapering we make use of the shadow masked growth technique. Tapered lasers with beam divergences of 15-degrees in both lateral and transverse directions were realized. In comparison with untapered lasers, the coupling losses to cleaved single-mode fibers could be reduced by 4.8 dB down to 5.8 dB.