Uber in Brazil: Who Writes the Rules, and Where They Stopped

The app is not a taxi, and the law says so twice

Brazil's Urban Mobility Law splits individual transport in two, and the halves are not variations of each other.

A taxi is transporte público individual, open to anyone on the street, and driving one is a regulated profession: a 2011 law reserves it to licensed taxistas, caps the car at seven passengers, requires a course in defensive driving and first aid, and in any city above 50,000 people a taximeter verified every two years. The city fixes the price in advance — Rio publishes its table, R$ 6.30 to start the meter and R$ 3.85 per kilometer by day.

A ride app is the other half, written in during 2018: transporte remunerado privado individual de passageiros, paid private transport not open to the public, booked only by users already registered on a platform. No profession, no course, no meter, no published price. That is why a Brazilian tells you the app "is not regulated like a taxi." It is not a complaint about enforcement; the two services sit in different articles of one statute.

What federal law asks of a driver, and where the penalty lives

The federal law is four articles long. It creates no regulator, sets no fare and imposes no national safety standard. Article 11-A gives municipalities and the Federal District exclusive power to regulate the service.

Article 11-B lists what a driver must hold, and opens with a conditional the English summaries drop: it applies "in municipalities that choose to regulate" it. Where it bites, the driver needs a category B license or higher carrying the annotation that he drives for a living, a car within the maximum age the traffic authority and the city set, a current registration, and a clean criminal-record certificate.

The annotation is older than the apps. EAR (exerce atividade remunerada) entered the traffic code in 2001, seventeen years earlier, built for taxi and truck drivers — and it now does duty for the app on the same license a visitor reads about.

Driving without those requirements is what the law calls "illegal transport of passengers": a label with no penalty attached. The penalty lives in the traffic code, where carrying paying passengers unlicensed is a gravíssima infraction, the heaviest of four grades, with a fine and removal of the car. The code prices a gravíssima at R$ 293.47, a figure written into it in 2016.

The only federal regulation below the law is about pensions rather than safety: a 2019 decree has the driver enroll himself with social security and prove it to the platform himself. A 2026 law renames both categories — the app becomes transporte privado individual sob demanda — but it only takes effect on June 14, 2027, and leaves the municipal power untouched.

A city may regulate ride apps. It may not ban them.

In May 2019 the Supreme Court closed the question twice in two days.

The lead case came from São Paulo, and the side defending the ban was the city council that wrote it: Municipal Law 16,279 of 2015 prohibited paid rides in private cars booked through apps, with a R$ 1,700 fine. The council took it to the Supreme Court and lost unanimously on May 8. The next day the court fixed the binding thesis — banning or restricting the activity is unconstitutional and, in the half that gets quoted less, a city regulating it may not contradict the parameters set by federal law. On that same May 8, in a separate case, the court struck down Fortaleza's ban law in its entirety.

The 2015 São Paulo law is still in the city's legislation catalogue, with no note of repeal and no mention of the case. Read it alone and you would conclude that Uber is illegal in São Paulo. A municipal database carrying no repeal mark is not evidence that a law still works.

Three cities, three outcomes — and two undid their own rules

Because the power is municipal, "the rules for Uber in Brazil" do not exist as one thing.

Rio repealed its car ride-hailing decree in January 2023 and we found no replacement in the city's gazette; the only later decree aimed at app platforms, from October 2025, covers motorcycle rides and deliveries, not cars. The repealing act names its reasons: a state-court unconstitutionality case, and two bills the mayor had sent to the council. The city's own news site, meanwhile, still describes the 2019 regime — the training course, the eight-year car — in the present tense, with no notice that it fell.

Then the detail that catches almost everyone: São Paulo's international airport is not in São Paulo. It stands in Guarulhos, which repealed its ride-hailing decree in October 2025. So a passenger walking out at GRU is under neither São Paulo's decree, which stops at the city line, nor a Guarulhos one. What governs there is the airport's own curb: a controlled pickup plaza at Terminal 2 arrivals that only a driver with an active trip may enter, naming Uber, 99 and Rhino as current partners. Those are an operator's rules for its property, not a city's rules for the service — and what each way into the city costs is a guide of its own.

Congonhas, the domestic airport inside São Paulo proper, inverts it: the city decree does reach it, and the airport's own arrival page lists taxi ranks and bus lines with no mention of ride apps at all.

What São Paulo still requires

The 2016 decree is the one live rulebook of the three, and it aims first at the company: only a platform credentialed by city hall as an OTTC may intermediate rides.

Driver and car then need two municipal documents, the CONDUAPP register and the CSVAPP vehicle certificate. Getting them takes the annotated license, proof of address, social-security enrollment, a criminal-record certificate, inspection on the city committee's terms, insurance of two kinds and a car no more than ten years old. Ten is the live number; the same page still shows five years from 2016 and eight from 2018, inside articles that were replaced. A vehicle age quoted without a city and a year is worth nothing here.

Two things on your screen in São Paulo are obligations rather than features: the platform must show the driver's photo, the car model and the plate before the ride, and issue an electronic receipt with route, time, distance and a price breakdown. A fare ceiling exists on paper — the decree lets the platform price freely up to a maximum set by a city committee — and we found no act of that committee setting a number. One requirement is simply gone: the municipal training course was among the 18 provisions the state court voided in 2023, with the per-kilometer charge the city levied on platforms.

"Is Uber safe in Brazil?" is a question the country does not count

It is the most searched form of the question, and the honest answer starts with what the state measures.

Brazil's national public-security dataset defines 27 reporting categories and none of them separates ride-hailing, taxi or any mode of transport; the nearest is "death in traffic or arising from it." Rio de Janeiro's open crime file, the most granular we opened, has 62 columns — it separates robbery on public transport, and even bicycle theft — and has no ride-hailing column. Minas Gerais publishes 8 columns and 15 offence types, none about apps; that state can pull the cut from its own system when a reporter asks, and does not publish it as a series.

Read the Rio one again. The state counts robbery inside a bus and counts nothing about the car you booked. What a statistics office chooses to separate is itself an answer.

So we will not tell you which app is safer. Nobody can from public data, and the number would be invented.

What can be said is narrower. Federal law requires the criminal-record certificate and the annotated license, and in São Paulo the platform must show you the photo and the plate. Each company also publishes a description of its own systems: Uber says drivers pass a multi-step check of criminal records and license, and that passengers are verified by credit card or by CPF and date of birth against a government database; 99 says it has more than 50 safety features and verifies everyone before a first ride. Both describe an emergency button, with limits in the fine print — Uber's automatic hand-off to the 190 police line is described for Rio only, and 99's data-sharing with police depends on your state. Those are the companies describing themselves; nothing we opened audits whether it runs that way.

Cash: both apps take it, for two different reasons

Both platforms provide for cash in their Brazilian contracts, which surprises visitors from countries where the app is card-only. The symmetry stops there, and the difference decides who can say no to you.

In Uber's Brazilian terms, cash is the company's option: "if Uber makes the cash payment option available" and you choose it, you pay the driver in full at the end of the trip, or in the app by QR code. Change may come back as Uber Cash credit, and Uber may cap the cash amount, in which case you must keep another payment method on file.

In 99's passenger terms, which the company publishes in English as well as Portuguese, cash is the driver's option: payment goes "through one of the available payment methods that could be accepted by Partner Drivers," listed as cash, the driver's own card machine, or the app. The Portuguese version adds that those direct methods are used at the user's own risk.

Both allow cash, then, and neither promises it. Uber's terms also list CPF among data that registration "may include," which is not the same as a tourist needing one — see what a CPF is. Whether a card issued abroad works in the Brazilian app is documented by neither company; what a foreign card costs here and where to draw cash are separate questions with answers.

Sources

• Presidency of the Republic — Urban Mobility Law 12,587/2012, arts. 4, 11-A, 11-B and 12, as amended by Law 13,640/2018; the 2019 social-security decree; the traffic code, arts. 147, 231 and 258; the taxi profession law; the 2026 law that renames the categories from June 2027 (accessed August 28, 2026)
• Supreme Federal Court — Theme 967, merits May 8 and thesis May 9, 2019, and the Fortaleza case (accessed August 28, 2026)
• Prefeitura de São Paulo — compiled Decree 56,981/2016, arts. 3, 6, 13, 15, 15-A and 15-D, carrying 18 unconstitutionality marks, and the still-catalogued 2015 ban law (accessed August 28, 2026)
• Rio de Janeiro — the gazette of January 16, 2023, page 3; the 2019 city article still in the present tense; taxi fares. Guarulhos — the repealing decree of October 3, 2025 (accessed August 28, 2026)
• Crime data — ConSinesp Resolution 6/2021, the 27 national categories; the Rio file, 62 columns; the Minas Gerais file, 8 columns (accessed August 28, 2026)
• Companies — Uber's safety page and Brazilian terms, version of August 12, 2026; 99's safety page and passenger terms in English; the GRU pickup plaza and Congonhas arrivals (accessed August 28, 2026)

Method on how we research; author Jeff Bruno, in Curitiba. Neighbours: getting around, money, all guides.

What we could not verify

• Whether a card issued outside Brazil works inside the Brazilian app. Neither company's terms qualify where the card comes from: Uber asks for "at least one valid payment method," and 99 lists the app itself without naming an issuer.
• The maximum fare São Paulo's committee may set. The power is in the decree. We opened the committee's 2021 and 2022 resolutions and neither fixes a fare; the R$ 0.12 that circulates is the price of kilometer credits, part of the regime the court voided. A 2016 resolution stayed shut, because that catalogue's search only assembles with JavaScript.
• How many Brazilian cities have regulated the service. No national register exists to consult, and the 2026 law does not create one. Federal law gives each city the power and no duty to report using it.
• What the two rulings actually say. The São Paulo case file opens — filed June 2023, closed administratively, appeals running to June 2025 — but not the judgment itself, and we did not open the Rio one. What is proven is the unconstitutionality mark in the city's own compiled text, not the reasoning behind it.
• The fate of the two bills Rio sent to its council in 2021, named in the decree that repealed everything. If one became law, our sentence about no replacement needs revising.
• São Paulo state's own crime data. The security portal serves a JavaScript shell and the state's open-data domain did not connect from here. That is verification pending, never the opposite of what the three files we did open show.