Do US Citizens Need a Visa for Brazil? Yes, Since 2025

The date is April 10, 2025 — not 2023

Decree 11,515, signed on May 2, 2023, revoked the 2019 waiver, and almost every article that week reported the visa was back. It was not. The decree took nearly two years to bite: its article 3, the one that sets the start date, was rewritten four times — October 1, 2023, then January 10, 2024, then April 10, 2024, and finally April 10, 2025, by Decree 11,982/2024, signed the day before the previous deadline expired.

Only the last one took effect, and five official sources agree: the decree chain, the Foreign Ministry's country-by-country chart, and the consulates in New York, Miami and Washington. Washington puts it in a line — "Effective April 10th 2025, the Brazilian Government has implemented the requirement of visitor visas for citizens of Australia, Canada and the United States."

The dead versions still sit on the government's site, struck through: two by an HTML tag, one by a stylesheet rule. Read only the tag and April 10, 2024 looks live. It never governed anything, and it still turns up in print.

Reciprocity, not retaliation

Between June 17, 2019 and April 9, 2025, Americans, Canadians, Australians and Japanese entered Brazil without a visa. The 2019 decree called that waiver unilateral — Brazil gave it away without getting anything back. That word is why it fell.

Brazil's standing rule is reciprocity, and the regulation makes it conditional: the waiver goes to nationals of a country "that assures reciprocity of treatment to Brazilian nationals, for as long as that reciprocity lasts."

The proof this was a rule and not a reprisal is Japan. The 2019 decree named four countries; only three lost the waiver. Brazil and Japan signed a mutual visa-waiver exchange of notes in Brasília on August 9, 2023, in force since September 30, 2023 — a year and a half before the revocation bit. Japan had turned a gift into a deal, so it kept its waiver. Washington had not. Even that deal has a clock: the current renewal runs to September 29, 2029, and either government can end it with 30 days' written notice. Waivers are contracts, not permanent states.

For the general rule and the full list of exempt nationalities — Britons and Irish among them — see do I need a visa for Brazil, which also covers layovers.

The e-Visa is the only door

For a US, Canadian or Australian passport, the electronic visa is not one option among several. The Consulate General in New York states it plainly: "The Consulate General of Brazil will not accept in-person applications for tourism or business visas from citizens of these countries." Washington adds that the process "is 100% online" and needs no physical documents.

Requirements are short: a signed passport valid through the trip with two blank visa pages, the online form, a 2×2 photo on a white background, and the fee. The consular visitor visa other nationalities file also asks for bank statements and tickets.

Two cautions the marketing copy leaves out. "Fully online" is the practice, not a right: the regulation lets a consular officer request originals, ask for more documents, or call an applicant in for an interview. And processing runs about 10 business days, with New York stating outright that it "does not issue emergency visas." The platform advises applying two months ahead, and not buying tickets before approval.

What it costs, and why the number moves

You pay US$80.90 — the figure published by the New York consulate's notice and Miami's page. The same New York consulate's fee table says $80.00. Both are right; they measure different things.

The fee schedule in force (Portaria MRE 664/2026, effective June 1, 2026) prices the electronic visitor visa for the United States, Canada and Australia at 80 reais-ouro, "gold reais". That is an accounting unit, not currency: Brazil's Consular Regulation fixes one gold real at US$1.00, converted into local currency at the commercial dollar rate on the day of payment. The schedule is written once, in Brasília, and every consulate collects in its own currency — which is why the same visa carries a different local figure depending on where you pay. The extra US$0.90 matches, to the cent, the unit price Brazil pays the platform operator under that Gazette contract; that last step is our arithmetic across three documents, not an official breakdown.

Reciprocity is written into the price too. Item 220.5 of the schedule is named, in the norm itself, "VIVIS Concessão (Reciprocidade Estados Unidos)" and costs 185 gold reais — US$185 — against 80 for most of the world. Australians pay 120, Algerians 85. But that 185 is the consular visitor visa. Through the electronic channel an American pays 80: the online route is not merely easier, it is under half the price.

Two clocks: validity and stay

Validity is the window in which a visa can be used to enter Brazil. Stay is how long you may remain once inside. Travelers merge them constantly.

Stay is the number that shapes a trip. New York publishes it as "a stay of up to 90 days per year in Brazilian territory," and tells you to "contact the Federal Police in Brazil" to go longer. Behind that: 90 days, extendable by the Federal Police by up to 90 more, capped at 180 days per ano migratório — a migration year counted from your first entry, not from January. The count is suspended, not reset, when you leave.

Validity is where the official record goes quiet, and we treat it that way below. What the norm does say is that the electronic visa carries the same validity and stay as the physical one — wording given by Portaria MRE 495/2023, which replaced an older rule capping the e-Visa at two years. A visitor visa is valid for one year by default, and up to ten where reciprocity has been agreed by diplomatic note.

One trap deserves its own line. A valid Brazilian visa in an expired passport still works, provided you also carry a valid travel document — except for the e-Visa. The Consular Regulation excludes it by name: e-Visa holders must present the same document used to obtain the visa. Renew your passport afterward and the e-Visa stops working. Apply with the newest passport you have.

The bill that could undo all of this

Congress has been trying to cancel the requirement, and has not finished. PDL 206/2023 would suspend Decree 11,515/2023 — the act that removed the waiver. The Senate approved it and sent it to the Chamber of Deputies for review in March 2025. It cleared the Foreign Affairs Committee in October 2025, and on March 3, 2026 the rapporteur in the Constitution and Justice Committee reported in favor. It has been marked ready for the floor ever since, and has not moved in six months.

None of that changes what you do today. A bill approved by one house suspends nothing: it needs both houses and promulgation. The Foreign Ministry's chart of August 26, 2026 still marks the United States as visa required. Headlines from March 2025 announcing that the Senate ended the requirement describe one step, not an outcome — and it is why Americans still reach check-in without a visa.

Sources

Read September 2, 2026.

• Presidency of the Republic — Decree 11,515/2023, the revocation and the four versions of article 3; Decree 11,982/2024, which set April 10, 2025; Decree 9,731/2019, the revoked unilateral waiver; Decree 9,199/2017, arts. 15, 20, 25 and 26
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs — the visa chart, updated August 26, 2026; New York's notice and fee table; Washington; the Brazil–Japan waiver, in force since September 30, 2023
• Official Gazette — Portaria MRE 664/2026, Annex I, items 220.2, 220.4, 220.5 and 220.11; the Consular Regulation, NSCJ 4.1.45 and 12.1.16–12.1.17; Portaria MRE 495/2023; the VFS Global contract
• Chamber of Deputies — PDL 206/2023, full procedural record

Method on how we research; Jeff Bruno writes from Curitiba. Next door: visa rules by nationality, apostilles, documents, all guides. After landing: American cards, your US carrier, GRU into São Paulo.

What we could not verify

• How many years the e-Visa is valid for. No consular page publishes a figure — we checked New York, Miami, Washington and Toronto. The only source giving one is a Ministry of Tourism release from December 2023: 10 years for Americans, 5 for Canadians and Australians. It also gets the start date wrong, and is now offline. The norm makes ten plausible without proving it — a visitor visa may run up to ten years where reciprocity is agreed, and the United States grants Brazilians ten.
• Whether the e-Visa is open to exactly three nationalities. The consulates and the platform's own FAQ name the United States, Canada and Australia. We do not write "only three": the fee schedule in force carries a second electronic visitor-visa line, for Mexico, and the platform's nationality menu offers a fourth choice. Neither settles it, and the act that would settle it is not in the Foreign Ministry's legislation index.
• What the US government tells Americans about entering Brazil. travel.state.gov returned 403 to us from both a Brazilian and a US address, and the US embassy's visa page in Brazil returned a technical error. We did not try to work around the block. It changes nothing here — the requirement comes from Brazilian law, which we read directly — but we cannot report the US side's wording.