Which ATM to Use in Brazil, and What Withdrawing Costs

Start with where the cash is. In Brazil it is often not in a bank branch at all: the independent networks put their machines inside shops, and one of the three withdrawal channels Brazil prices separately is a shop counter acting for a bank. So "no ATM on this street" and "no cash on this street" are different sentences, and the second one is rarer than a visitor expects. What the rest of this guide adds is what each of those routes costs.

Every number below is a declared ceiling, not a receipt. The central bank's file names that column Valor Máximo — maximum value — and each institution fills it in about itself. The file carries a reference date of July 31, 2026, and on August 26 no August file existed yet. Read the figures as the shape of the market on that date.

Three channels, three prices, one surprise

Brazil does not price "a withdrawal". It prices three, under three service codes, and the distance between them decides more than the name on the machine.

The third line is the surprise. A counter inside a supermarket sounds like the budget option, and one bank's own table agrees: Banco do Brasil publishes R$ 4.60 there against R$ 6.50 at a machine. Across the market the order flips, and reading a single bank's table gets it backwards.

The machine line hides a second shape. Its average of R$ 4.56 is pulled up by a thin tail: the median is R$ 4.00, declared values run from R$ 0.00 to R$ 50.00, and 141 of the 627 institutions declared zero.

Debit or credit: the button that costs more

A Brazilian machine can hand over cash two ways, and the catalog treats them as different services. Withdrawing on debit is code 12.10 above. Taking cash on the credit function is code 16.03, declared by 626 institutions on the same reference date.

The gap is wide wherever one institution publishes both. Banco do Brasil's own tariff table, in force since June 29, 2026, carries R$ 15.00 for cash on credit against R$ 6.50 at a machine on debit — about 2.3 times as much. Elsewhere in the catalog, declared ceilings for the credit-function withdrawal include R$ 30.00 at Inter, R$ 18.90 at Bradesco, R$ 18.80 at Santander, R$ 12.00 at Itaucard and R$ 5.00 at C6.

Do not turn that into a rule. Credit costs more at most institutions, not at all of them, and the market-wide count sits in the companion guide.

One line from the same table is easy to miss. Banco do Brasil also publishes R$ 25.00 for taking cash out abroad, with a footnote saying that fee covers the credit and the debit function alike. That is your situation in a mirror: a Brazilian at a foreign machine, priced by a Brazilian bank.

Not every machine looks like a machine

That third channel has hardware of its own. TecBan sells shops a compact unit it calls the mini Banco24Horas — as the company describes it, a compact version of the Banco24Horas that fits beside a shop's checkout, where customers withdraw cash, pay bills and check balances exactly as they would at an ATM. The trades it markets that unit to are the everyday ones: butcher, pharmacy, produce market, building supplies, bakery, stationery store, gas station and convenience store, supermarket.

The same company's home page offers three ways to take cash out at a shop: through the app, through the card machine at the counter, or straight from the card. None of the three carries a published price.

That is the frame at the top, in hardware: the cash is behind the counter you were going to walk past.

Four free withdrawals is a floor, not a figure

Resolution CMN 3,919/2010 lists the banking services a Brazilian institution may not charge an individual for. Among them: up to four withdrawals a month from a checking account, at a teller or a machine. A savings account gets two, and the two provisions are not copies of each other. Why none of this reaches a card issued abroad is a separate question, answered next door.

Four is a minimum. Both independent networks say so in their own way. The Banco24Horas page on the free-service package carries an asterisk: the count can be higher depending on the package the customer contracted. Saque e Pague publishes eight free withdrawals a month per account, counted per bank — its own example is a customer holding a Nubank account and a Mercado Pago account, who gets eight at each, sixteen in all.

Which is why the person ahead of you may well pay nothing, and why that tells you nothing about your own card.

What the networks do charge for

A free withdrawal is not a free machine. Saque e Pague publishes Pix Saque at its machines as carrying no fee, for every bank including the digital ones — and on the same help page it publishes a price list for the opposite motion. Putting cash in starts at R$ 3.60 for deposits of R$ 5 to R$ 45 and climbs across nine bands to R$ 15.50 for deposits of R$ 1,500 to R$ 2,000.

The direction of the money, not the machine, is what decides whether there is a price. What Pix Saque is, and why it needs a Brazilian account tied to a CPF, is set out in the companion guide — along with why a visitor rarely holds one.

The line the individuals' table does not have

The catalog does name the machine most visitors will actually use: code 05.01, described in Portuguese as a withdrawal at an external ATM or banco 24 horas terminal. On July 31, 2026 all 637 entries under it belonged to companies.

Nobody forgot the other half. The file is two tables in one. Codes 01.01 through 10.19 are the business side — 38,334 lines, not one of them an individual. Codes 11.01 through 17.07 are the individuals' side — 29,156 lines, not one of them a company. There is no exception in either direction, so the independent-network withdrawal has no line at all on the side of the file that covers people.

The practical reading is short. For an individual, what the machine costs is set by the bank that issued the card, under whichever of the three channel lines that bank treats as the right one — and the catalog never says which. For a card issued outside Brazil, there is no Brazilian figure to look up at all.

Sources

• Banco Central do Brasil — the tariff file read here, reference date July 31, 2026. Catalog download (accessed August 26, 2026)
• Banco Central do Brasil — who answers for the declared values. Open-data record (accessed August 26, 2026)
• Conselho Monetário Nacional — free essential services, art. 2. Resolution CMN 3,919/2010 (accessed August 26, 2026)
• Banco do Brasil — the withdrawal and cash-on-credit lines, in force June 29, 2026. Tariff table for individuals (accessed August 26, 2026)
• TecBan — the counter unit and the trades it targets. mini Banco24Horas (accessed August 26, 2026)
• TecBan — the free-service package and its asterisk. Banco24Horas gratuidade (accessed August 26, 2026)
• Saque e Pague — eight free withdrawals, and the deposit price list. Help pages (accessed August 26, 2026)
• Saque e Pague — Pix Saque without a fee. For you (accessed August 26, 2026)

Curitiba is where these pages get written and checked: the method is on how we research, the author is Jeff Bruno. Nearby sit what a CPF is, getting one as a foreigner, PIX once you hold one and the 10% on a restaurant bill. The topic index is money and payments; the whole shelf is all guides.

What we could not verify

• Which line of the individuals' table prices a withdrawal at an independent-network machine. Code 05.01 names that exact service and carries company entries only. Assigning it instead to the terminal line, 12.10, is an inference. The catalog never says so, and we are not publishing it as though it did.
• What a withdrawal at a shop counter costs. We searched TecBan's Portuguese, English and Spanish pages, both FAQs, the free-service page and the counter-unit page for any word meaning fee or rate. The unit and the service are described; no price for either is published.
• How old the network figures are. Neither TecBan nor Saque e Pague dates any page read here. The central bank's file and Banco do Brasil's table carry dates; the network pages carry none, so their numbers have no measurable age.
• Whether a declared R$ 0.00 means a free withdrawal. The column is a maximum each institution sets for itself, and the central bank says plainly that the content is the institution's own responsibility. No source we read shows what customers were actually charged.