How to Pay for Things in Brazil, From Cash to PIX

This page is the map for the sixteen money guides here: which instrument answers which counter, and where each stops. The transaction figures come from the Banco Central do Brasil's own payment statistics, read from its open-data service on September 24, 2026.

What Brazil actually reaches for

In the quarter ending June 30, 2026, the central bank counted 40.9 billion transactions across the instruments it collects. PIX was 22.9 billion of them — on its own, nearly twice the 11.8 billion run by credit, debit and prepaid cards combined. Cash was withdrawn 599 million times, which is one withdrawal for every 38 PIX payments.

The averages are ours, dividing the central bank's value column by its quantity column, and they sketch the working map better than the totals do: debit sits at coffee-and-bus money, credit at the mid-sized purchase, boleto at the monthly bill. PIX spans all of it, because the same rails carry a market stallholder's R$ 12 and a company's invoice.

One line matters before you read any share as a picture of the street: cash payments are not in that table. The central bank states that for transactions in cash the statistics cover only withdrawals, so notes changing hands are counted once, when they leave the machine, and never again.

Where the machines are, and where they are not

Acceptance and access are two different questions, and Brazil answers them very differently. At the end of March 2026 the central bank counted 52.87 million POS terminals installed at merchants — that is terminals, not shops, and a shop served by more than one acquirer can appear more than once. Against that, the whole country held 115,236 cash machines.

The ATM number has a second layer. The central bank splits the machines by whether use is shared or restricted to the institution's own customers, and on that date 47,611 of the 115,236 were restricted-access: four in ten. Which machine to use, and what withdrawing costs works through the channels and the published fees; getting cash with no local card or account covers the route a visitor actually has.

The five counters you will actually stand at

Two rows need a footnote. The 10% added to a restaurant bill is not a tax and no labour statute sets it — what the 10% really is takes that apart, including the state that orders it printed as optional. And on the ride-app line the card lives in the app, not at the kerb, so the ride ends with no terminal and no scramble for change: how Uber works in Brazil, Uber against 99 and what moto-taxis are cover the ride itself.

The CPF is the fork in the road

The Cadastro de Pessoas Físicas (CPF) is Brazil's individual taxpayer number, and it is the single field that decides which half of this map you are on. What a CPF is and when Brazil asks for one sets out the registry; how a foreigner gets one covers the three routes, including the online form for applicants living abroad.

For a two-week trip you probably do not need one. Nothing in the table above requires a CPF, and when a cashier asks for it at the till, that is the shop's paperwork rather than yours — why the cashier asks explains what the question is for and what you can offer instead.

It becomes decisive the moment you want PIX. Can tourists use PIX is the short answer; what changes once you have a CPF is the long one, through the key types, the five-key limit and the name rule. A card issued abroad also meets Brazil's own filing system at the cash machine, which is why the débito-or-crédito prompt confuses people: what that screen is really asking.

Paying a person, and the apps that promise PIX

Paying an individual is where a visitor's options collapse to one. Brazilians settle rent, a share of dinner and a plumber's callout with PIX, and nothing reaches a stranger's account from a foreign card. That leaves cash, which makes two guides load-bearing: how much you may bring in, where the line is US$ 10,000 per person, and whether your dollars spend here — you change them rather than hand them over.

The apps advertised as "PIX from abroad" are the common workaround, and they are not a foreign account learning to speak PIX. Wise, AstroPay and Revolut each appeared in the central bank's own register through a Brazilian entity when that register was read on August 27, 2026, and the PIX function lives inside an account in reais held by that entity — which is why each company publishes its own sign-up requirement for it. Who actually writes that rule goes through the three registrations and what each one publishes. Sending money to someone else in Brazil is a different transaction, with paperwork that sits mostly on the receiving end: what each route asks for. Their cards, meanwhile, work exactly like any other card carrying the same brand: do foreign credit cards work here.

Boleto: the bill that is not a card

The instrument no arrival guide mentions carried 1.4 billion transactions in that same quarter, at an average of R$ 1,773. A boleto is a standardized payment order registered centrally, not a bill in the sense a visitor expects, and it belongs to a payment arrangement the central bank itself instituted.

That phrase is load-bearing. Law 12,865/2013 defines an arranjo de pagamento as the set of rules governing a payment service accepted by more than one recipient, and hands the central bank the job of authorizing and policing them — which is why a slip issued by one bank is payable at another. It is also the framework Wise and AstroPay registered under, though Revolut did not.

You will meet one if you rent, see a private clinic, or book a guesthouse that bills rather than charges. The catch is the last step: the electronic version reaches you through DDA, at the institution where you are already a customer, so paying one in practice means holding a Brazilian account. What a boleto is, and what happens when it expires carries its published rules, including which payments cash may and may not settle. Renting an apartment is where most foreigners run into it first.

What the choice costs you

Every route on this page has two price layers, and only one of them is Brazilian. Brazil's own tax on a foreign card's purchase here was zero when the rule was read on August 26, 2026, which leaves the gap between the price on the tag and the figure on your statement to your own issuer: what American cards really cost separates the two. At a cash machine the Brazilian side does publish fees, but for its own account holders — not for a card issued abroad.

The genuinely Brazilian costs are smaller and more specific: the service line on a restaurant bill, the spread at an exchange counter, the toll on a highway, the metro ticket in São Paulo. If you are staying long enough for a Brazilian account to make sense, opening one moves you onto the other half of this map.

Sources

• Banco Central do Brasil — retail payment statistics, resource MeiosdePagamentosTrimestralDA, reference quarter 2026Q2 (base date June 30, 2026): quantities in thousands, values in R$ millions. Open-data service (accessed September 24, 2026)
• Banco Central do Brasil — POS and PDV terminal counts, resource INFRTERMDA, and cash machine counts, resource ESTATATMDA, both for quarter 2026Q1 and summed across the 27 federal units; quarter 2023Q1 of the same resource for the growth comparison. ⚠️ The service returns the quarter asked for and every later one, so 2023Q1 has to be filtered out of the response before summing. ESTATATMDA · Open-data service (accessed September 24, 2026)
• Banco Central do Brasil — dataset notes for Estatísticas de Meios de Pagamentos, including the statement that for cash the statistics cover only withdrawals. dadosabertos.bcb.gov.br (accessed September 24, 2026)
• Banco Central do Brasil — Meu BC, boleto questions: O que é boleto, Pagamento de boleto em espécie, Pagamento de boleto utilizando o Pix and Boleto físico e eletrônico. bcb.gov.br/meubc/faqs/s/boleto (entries last modified between July 2024 and February 2025; accessed September 24, 2026)
• Presidência da República — Law 12,865/2013, arts. 6, 7 and 9: the definitions of a payment arrangement and a payment institution, the principles they must observe, and the central bank's authority over both (accessed September 24, 2026)

How these guides are checked is on our method page, written by Jeff Bruno in Curitiba. The rest of this topic is under money, and everything published so far is in all guides.

What we could not verify

• What share of everyday spending is cash. The central bank's table counts withdrawals, not the payments made with the notes afterwards, and says so. Every figure on this page is drawn from the instruments it collects, which is not the same as what changes hands at Brazilian counters.
• Whether a street taxi will take your card. Card acceptance in taxis is set by municipal rules and by the driver's own arrangement with an acquirer, and we found no national rule and no published national figure. Treat the table row as a habit, not an entitlement.
• What Revolut currently publishes about PIX. Its help center and its international transfer page both served a bot check instead of a page on September 24, 2026. The reading behind the section above is the one taken on August 27, 2026 for the guide on PIX without a Brazilian account, and we are not restating it as today's wording.
• Whether the 52.87 million POS figure counts any terminal twice. The central bank describes the column as terminals installed at merchants, connected to the acquirer's network, and publishes no de-duplicated figure. A shop served by three acquirers plausibly appears three times, and the series has more than doubled since the first quarter of 2023 — 21.68 million then, 52.87 million now. Read it as terminal density, never as a count of shops.
• Hotel and guesthouse payment practice. Nothing in the payment rules obliges a hotel to accept a card, or to pre-authorize one at check-in, and we found no published national survey. That row reflects what the instruments allow, not a measured practice.