Is Brazil 110V or 220V? The Answer Is a City, Not a Country

Two standards, and the rule that hands out the choice

The national anchor is ANEEL, the electricity regulator. Two consecutive tables in Module 8 of its distribution procedures list every nominal voltage a low-voltage connection point may have: 220/127 and 380/220, with adequate socket readings of 117 to 133 V and 202 to 231 V. That is the entire menu.

Read the pairs correctly and the confusion goes away. The numbers are phase-to-phase and phase-to-neutral, and a domestic socket is fed phase-to-neutral; Enel's own table labels the values (fase-neutro/fase-fase). So a 220/127 network gives 127 V at the socket, a 380/220 network 220 V.

Who picks is written down too. Neoenergia's DIS-NOR-030, one document covering five utilities from Bahia to Brasília, says it falls to the distributor to establish and inform the voltage available to the buildings of the locality (item 6.2.4), and that no consumer unit may be connected at any other voltage (6.2.6). "It depends on the city" is not a hedge: it is where the rule puts the decision.

Where a value is actually published

Every row comes from the utility's own technical standard, with none filled in by analogy.

Two rows are clean opposites. In Celesc's 154-page standard for Santa Catarina all five supply types are 220 V phase-to-neutral, and "127" appears twice in the whole document — both as a page number. Cemig is the mirror image: its low-voltage list for Minas Gerais has 127/220 V and 120/240 V, and no 380/220.

Paraná carries a date instead of a value. Copel's file server answers HTTP 503, and what the Internet Archive holds there is the block page, not the PDF. The May 2011 edition is complete, and all four of its supply types are 127 V phase-to-neutral, with "380" appearing zero times in 119 pages. An answer with an age on it gets labelled — the method.

Mato Grosso and Sergipe are the row we deleted. Energisa's table appears to put both at 380/220, but the cells are merged across two voltage rows, and the notes underneath settle it: 380/220 V is available in some areas of the interior of the two, subject to prior approval. It is the exception there — so this page does not call Cuiabá or Aracaju 220 V cities.

One state, two answers: the Bahia file

Coelba, the Bahia utility, publishes something no other we searched does: the voltage municipality by municipality, as a downloadable file. It holds 418 rows — all 417 municipalities of Bahia plus Delmiro Gouveia, which is in Alagoas. Of those, 299 are 380/220 and 118 are 220/127, with one entry written the other way round.

Salvador sits in the smaller group. Most of the postcard names sit in the larger one: Porto Seguro, Santa Cruz Cabrália, Cairu, Maraú and the Chapada Diamantina towns of Lençóis, Mucugê and Palmeiras are 380/220, which is 220 V at the socket. Itacaré is 127 V; Maraú, next door, is 220 V.

That is this page in one line: you can land in a 127 V capital, take a boat, and arrive somewhere 220 V without leaving the state. Continue by rented car and it changes at a municipal boundary, unannounced.

One honest limit: the file lists municipalities, not beaches. Morro de São Paulo is a district of Cairu, Barra Grande sits inside Maraú, and the file does not claim the value holds at every address in them.

Looking at the socket will not tell you

Brazil has one socket, and it serves both voltages. The standard is ABNT NBR 14136:2012, Corrected Version 5:2021, and its title — quoted inside the Inmetro regulation in force — sets the range: plugs and sockets for domestic use up to 20 A / 250 V. A socket rated to 250 V is agnostic about what runs behind it.

The markings do not rescue you either. Every plug and socket sold here must carry stamped on its body the maker's name or mark, the voltage it is intended for, and the power in watts or the current in amperes. That describes the component, not the wiring in that wall.

What the shape does tell you is current. There are two pin gauges: 4 mm up to 10 A and 4.8 mm up to 20 A. The thicker pin will not enter the thinner socket, which is why an appliance bought in Brazil sometimes will not fit a Brazilian socket.

And the recessed socket is not universal. Inmetro describes a hexagonal well that keeps a finger off a live pin and stops a single pin going in alone — but the regulation in force expressly contemplates that recess being removed, provided the geometry of the holes stays within NBR 14136. Both are legal, so whether a fat foreign plug body reaches the pins depends on the socket in front of you.

Adapters are certified. They change shape, never voltage.

Adapters and the three-way plug Brazilians call a benjamim are excluded from the 2022 plug-and-socket regulation — not because nobody regulates them, but because they have their own. Portaria Inmetro 9, of 17 January 2022, approved the consolidated conformity requirements for adapters, revoked the 2007 rule it replaced, and has applied since 1 February 2022. An adapter sold in Brazil is certified, and carries the Inmetro seal.

What no adapter does is change the voltage. That is a transformer's job, and whether you need one is decided by your own device's label — exactly where Brazil's plug rule stops. The word bivolt, the everyday term for dual-voltage, does not appear once in the regulation we read. It governs the connector, not the appliance.

One practical note: if your devices charge over USB, this question dissolves into the other one — whether your phone finds a network, or whether an eSIM settles that before you land.

Why the plug looks like nothing you own

ABNT published NBR 14136 in July 1998, built on the draft international standard IEC 60906-1. Inmetro answers the obvious follow-up on its FAQ page: Brazil did not adopt the international standard because there is no such thing — every country developed its own, and the answer lists Argentina, the United States, France, Japan and Australia among the examples. A 2000 ordinance made the Brazilian one compulsory from 1 January 2006, and the transition closed on 1 July 2011, when shops stopped being allowed to sell equipment with non-standard plugs attached.

One last thing, and it matters more than it looks. The source almost every English-language article leans on here — the IEC's World Plugs guide, the origin of the "Type N" label — has been retired. The page now says it "is no longer available" and suggests asking your travel adapter manufacturer or a trusted travel website instead. The standards body handed the question back to the shops.

Sources

• ANEEL — PRODIST Module 8, Tables 4 and 5, from the regulator's public code repository, because its document archive sits behind a bot challenge (accessed August 28, 2026)
• Neoenergia — DIS-NOR-030 rev. 04, items 6.2.4 and 6.2.6, July 2023, and Coelba's per-municipality file, dated August 2025 (accessed August 28, 2026)
• Light — RECON-BT 2026, Rio de Janeiro; Enel — low-voltage connection%20%E2%80%93%20Conex%C3%A3o%20Individual%20BT.pdf), March 2025, Table 1, for São Paulo, Rio and Ceará (accessed August 28, 2026)
• Cemig — ND-5.1, item 4.3, Minas Gerais; Celesc — N-321.0001, December 2025, item 5.3.2, Santa Catarina (accessed August 28, 2026)
• Energisa — NDU-001 v7.0, November 2024, Table 1 and its notes, from an archived copy after the live address refused us; Copel — NTC 901100, May 2011, item 4.2 (accessed August 28, 2026)
• Inmetro — Ordinance 90 of 2022 on plugs and sockets, Ordinance 9 of 2022 on adapters, and the FAQ and origin page of the standard, content from 2011; IEC — World Plugs (accessed August 28, 2026)

Method on how we research; author Jeff Bruno, in Curitiba. Neighbours: Brazil basics, phones and internet, all guides.

What we could not verify

• The distance between the pins, and so whether your own plug fits. The figure of 19 mm circulates in every travel article and adapter listing, and it has no primary source we could reach: ABNT sells the Brazilian standard rather than publishing it, and the European and American plug standards are sold too. The IEC, which used to arbitrate, retired the guide that did it and now sends readers to adapter manufacturers — precisely the source we will not accept in place of a standard. So we publish the pin diameters Inmetro states, and no spacing.
• What Brazilian law makes an appliance print about its voltage. The regulation we read covers plugs and sockets, and the word for dual-voltage appears in it zero times. Appliance labelling belongs to another regime, which we did not find in a primary source.
• The current value for Paraná, and any value for Manaus, Belém, Porto Alegre, Recife, Natal and Brasília. Copel does not serve the current edition of its standard, and for the rest we did not open each utility's document — which is not the same as no source existing. Nor are we guessing: 299 municipalities in Bahia's file depart from the capital, which is what analogy gets wrong.
• Whether Brazil is the only country to adopt IEC 60906-1 nationally. The claim is everywhere, and the source that mapped national standards no longer exists.