How to receive a foreign payout in Brazil

Most guides to this topic start with fees. Fees matter, and we have written about them at length elsewhere. But the reason foreign payouts go wrong in Brazil is almost never the spread. It is that the money arrives without a story the receiving institution can accept, and then sits there while somebody asks you for a contract you never wrote.

So this guide runs in the order the money does: the legal frame, who may touch it, the record that gets created, what you hand over, and the tax nobody can currently quote you honestly.

The law behind the paperwork

Brazil replaced a scattered foreign-exchange framework whose oldest pieces date from the 1930s with Lei nº 14.286 of 29 December 2021 — the Banco Central refers to it as the novo marco cambial. One of its notable moves was to establish that exchange operations may be carried out freely, without a limit on the amount.

The Banco Central filled in the detail with its own resolutions. Resolução BCB nº 277 of 31 December 2022 covers the exchange market and the movement of local and foreign currency in and out of the country; it is also the text that leaves free the form in which an exchange operation is celebrated, subject to the applicable regulations. Resolução BCB nº 279 covers Brazilian capital held abroad. Those are the texts your bank or broker is actually applying when it asks you a question you find annoying.

Who is allowed to convert your money

Conversion has to run through an instituição autorizada a operar no câmbio: a licensed bank, a corretora de câmbio, or a licensed fintech operating under that authorisation. You cannot legally settle the exchange yourself, and you cannot arrange it privately with a friend who happens to hold dollars.

Every workaround people are offered — a contact who "knows someone with reais", an intermediary who will pay you locally if you leave your USD with them offshore — fails at exactly this point. The institution is the mandatory party, and its licence is what turns your inbound payment into a documented event that can be traced back years later.

What the contrato de câmbio does

When a licensed institution converts foreign currency for you, the operation is recorded. That record — the contrato de câmbio — is what ties a specific amount of foreign currency, at a specific rate, on a specific date, to you and to a stated purpose.

Treat it as the receipt for your own income. It is what you show a contador at the end of the year, and what documents the origin of the funds if a bank later asks. If you ever plan to buy property or explain a jump in revenue to a lender, the trail of exchange contracts is the explanation.

Documents, and which account it lands in

A foreign-currency invoice is not framed as a legally mandatory document in every case, but it is the standard instrument in practice: it is how you demonstrate the natureza da operação to the institution handling the exchange. Contracts, statements of work and platform payout reports serve the same purpose.

If your income arrives from marketplaces rather than named clients, our breakdown of how sales channels pay out covers what documentation each type of platform actually gives you.

IOF: why this page gives you no number

IOF applies to exchange operations, and the applicable band depends on the direction of the operation and its declared nature. You will find plenty of pages quoting you a percentage. We are not going to, and the reason is the more useful information.

Follow the sequence. On 22 May 2025 the government published Decreto nº 12.466/2025, raising rates across IOF on credit, on exchange and on insurance. On 11 June 2025 Decreto nº 12.499/2025 revoked that decree and its companion, keeping part of the increase and changing other parts. Later that month Congress knocked the increases down through Decreto Legislativo nº 176/2025. Then on 16 July 2025 a medida cautelar signed by the reporting justice, Alexandre de Moraes — a single-judge order issued ad referendum of the full court — partially restored the effect of Decreto 12.499/2025 retroactively to 11 June, with the levy on risco sacado (forfait) operations left suspended. The same order expressly ruled out charging anything retroactively for the window from 27 June to 16 July 2025, during which the decree had been without effect.

That order is preliminary and still awaits confirmation by the full court, which as of September 2026 has delivered no final ruling in the cases it covers — ADC 96, ADI 7827 and ADI 7839, each traceable on the STF's own case pages. If the increases are ultimately struck down, the underlying IOF regulation they amended is Decreto nº 6.306/2007, whose earlier wording Decreto Legislativo nº 176/2025 had restored. The constitutionality of the 2025 increases is, at the time of writing, unresolved.

Leaving the money abroad

Plenty of sellers keep a balance in USD or EUR and convert in tranches, which is a reasonable treasury habit; we cover the mechanics in our note on holding multiple currencies after payout.

Two things must be held apart here. Whether you may keep resources abroad is a foreign-exchange question. Whether you must report them is a separate obligation with its own rules. The Banco Central's Declaração de Capitais Brasileiros no Exterior (CBE) becomes compulsory only once your holdings abroad pass a value threshold, the rules covering Brazilian capital held abroad being the same Resolução BCB nº 279 mentioned earlier. The threshold is set high enough that a working balance parked with a payment provider is usually not what triggers it, but check the figure in force before you assume it either way. Income-tax reporting to the Receita Federal runs on its own separate criteria. The criminal provision discussed below is aimed at deliberate concealment and at informal offsetting arrangements, so the practical step is to check the current CBE threshold and your own filing position before you decide what has to be declared.

The "international Pix" question

Clients abroad sometimes ask for your Pix key. Pix runs inside Brazil and settles in reais only; it does not carry a cross-border transaction. Products marketed as "international Pix" appear to work by having a fintech or exchange house perform an ordinary remittance and then pay the Brazilian leg by Pix. Convenient — and the cross-border leg underneath still produces a contrato de câmbio in your name, with the same documentation and the same record-keeping behind it. If you sell to Brazilian buyers as well, our guide to Shopify and Pix in Brazil handles the domestic side.

The line worth knowing about

Article 22 of Lei nº 7.492/1986 covers evasão de divisas: carrying out an unauthorised exchange operation with the aim of effecting currency evasion carries two to six years of imprisonment plus a fine. The same article's sole paragraph extends that penalty to promoting the exit of currency or foreign exchange from the country without legal authorisation, and to maintaining deposits abroad that have not been declared to the competent federal authority. Case law and commentary place informal offsetting arrangements — the practice known as dólar-cabo — within its reach.

FAQ