PIX for Foreigners: What Changes Once You Have a CPF

The account is the step that comes before the key

A key does not float on its own. It points at what the rules call a transactional account: checking, savings or prepaid payment. The third matters most for a new arrival: payment institutions offer it as well as banks, and opening one does not depend on holding a checking account. Money in a payment account is not covered by Brazil's deposit guarantee fund.

The central bank publishes no document checklist. The institution must identify and qualify the customer, and it decides what to ask for. Acceptable identification means any document recognized by Brazilian law — a sentence that names foreigners explicitly. An institution may also offer simplified onboarding, in exchange for lower balance and deposit limits. What you are asked for varies from bank to bank.

The tax registration is the part that does not vary. A participant may register a key only after account opening is finished, identity verification included, and only for a holder whose CPF or CNPJ sits in a status the rules treat as regular. If the number does not exist yet, start with how to get a CPF as a foreigner; what a CPF actually is explains the rest. For a two-week trip, can tourists use PIX answers the question on its own.

Five key types, and the format each one takes

The list is closed: five types, and no institution can invent a sixth.

A foreign phone number cannot be a key: the format the rules set starts at +55. An individual may hold up to five keys per account, a company up to twenty. The cap applies per account regardless of how many people hold it, so a second account comes with five more. Hand out a random key when you would rather not publish your phone number or tax number.

The directory runs around the clock, but your bank only has to offer registration, deletion, portability and ownership claims between 8am and 8pm Brasília time. Paying is unaffected. To see what is registered in your name, the central bank runs a free report service, Registrato, listing every active key and the account behind it. It can take two days to appear and needs a gov.br login.

The name rule that decides whether your key works

This is where a long foreign name runs into trouble, and the rule is more forgiving than it first sounds. The name must conform to the federal tax registry: every word of the registered name must be present, and none may appear that is not part of it. The DICT Operational Manual then spells out the differences it tolerates.

• Diacritics the tax registry does not carry. The manual gives João and Joao as equally conforming, and likewise Conceição and CONCEICAO.
• Upper and lower case are not distinguished. Maria, MARIA and maria are one name.
• A period, comma, hyphen or apostrophe may be swapped for a space, or the other way around. Ben-Hur and Ben Hur both pass, as do D'Alembert and D Alembert.
• An ampersand may be written as the letter E.
• For an individual, words in the middle of the name may be abbreviated to their initial — provided the first name and last surname stay in full and nothing is dropped, including the connecting words da, de and do. Companies get no abbreviation.

What does not pass is a different spelling of the same-sounding word. Sousa and Souza are two names to the system, and so are Luis and Luiz. The failure mode is not the length of your name but a letter that drifted between your passport, your CPF application and the bank form.

If the data behind a key stops matching the registry, or the CPF falls into an irregular status — suspended, canceled, holder deceased, void — the key is removed rather than frozen. The institution has to tell you and give the reason. An active fraud marking goes further: you cannot register a key, look one up, or send or receive at the institution that made the mark.

You do not actually need a key

Registering one is optional, and the central bank says so plainly. Someone can pay you by typing your full account details — institution, branch, account number and your tax number — and the money arrives exactly as it would through a key. Useful in the first weeks, when the account exists but your phone number is still foreign.

The catch runs the other way: generating a QR Code requires a registered key. If you want the sticker on a counter, or a code to send over WhatsApp, you need at least one.

There are five ways to start a payment: typing a key, typing the account details, scanning a QR Code, pasting a copy-and-paste code (Pix Copia e Cola, the plain-text version of the same QR Code), or initiating it through Open Finance from another institution's app.

Whichever route you take, the receiver's CPF or CNPJ travels inside the message — the rules list it among the minimum information for initiating a payment. So the payer's screen names the person about to be paid, with a partly masked tax number under the name, before the money moves. That is why "just send me a PIX" is something Brazilians say to a stranger.

What it costs, and where the exception bites

For an individual, including an empresário individual (a registered sole trader) and a MEI (a registered microentrepreneur), the rules forbid the institution from charging you to send for a transfer or a purchase, or to receive a transfer. It is a prohibition on the bank, not a promotion it chose to run.

The exception is narrower than it looks: it reaches only sending, for transfer or purchase, through an in-person or telephone channel while electronic means were available. Paying at a branch counter instead of the app may carry a fee. Receiving a transfer stays free in every channel, counter included.

Charging an individual becomes possible in three further situations, all of which read as commercial activity: going past 30 receipts in a month, receiving through a dynamic QR Code, or receiving from a company payer. Cash withdrawals through PIX have their own tariff regime, covered in getting cash in Brazil without a local card.

How fast it is, and where the ceilings sit

That service level is measured end to end, from the payer's side: half of all payments must complete within 6.0 seconds and 99% within 10.0 seconds. The 40-second cap covers the primary channel and applies equally to orders settled outside the central system; the exception is the secondary channel, used for scheduled payments and charges with a due date, where the limit is 45 minutes.

Value limits move with the clock. Between 8pm and 6am, payments to an individual receiver are capped at R$1,000 per transaction unless that person has expressly asked for something different. The window can be shifted to 10pm–6am on request. From 6am to 8pm each institution sets the ceiling from the customer's risk profile. There is no single national clock: the hours may follow the user's own city or Brasília time, at each participant's discretion.

Changing them is asymmetric on purpose. A reduction, including to zero, applies immediately. An increase can be refused, and where accepted takes 24 to 48 hours.

Sources

• Key types, conditions for registering one, and what a payment must carry. Resolution BCB 1/2020 (accessed August 26, 2026)
• Formats, the per-account cap, name conformity, removal. Version 8.5 takes effect September 1, 2026 and keeps these rules. DICT Operational Manual v8.4 (accessed August 26, 2026)
• The 40-second cap and the required percentiles. PIX Times Manual v7.0 (accessed August 26, 2026)
• What an institution may and may not charge an individual. Resolution BCB 19/2020 (accessed August 26, 2026)
• Value limits, paying without a key, ways to start a payment. Central bank PIX FAQ (accessed August 26, 2026)
• Who decides which identity documents are acceptable. Central bank FAQ on bank accounts (accessed August 26, 2026)

All six are published by the Banco Central do Brasil. Written in Curitiba by Jeff Bruno; the checking behind these pages is described in how we research. The rest of this cluster sits under money and payments, and the full list is in all guides.

What we could not verify

• How long a payment takes in practice, as opposed to how long it is allowed to take. The PIX Times Manual publishes the percentiles participants must meet and the method for calculating them, not the performance observed. We read version 7.0 in full and found required figures only.
• The daytime limit at any specific institution. From 6am to 8pm each institution sets its own ceiling, and the regulation delegates the numbers to a separate central bank document. The FAQ entry on limits, updated January 2, 2026, states the rule without a figure.
• Which documents a given bank will ask a foreigner for. The central bank says any identity document recognized by Brazilian law counts, foreigners included, and leaves the decision to the institution. We read its FAQ on bank accounts on August 26, 2026 and found no per-institution list; none is published.