Voltage in Rio de Janeiro vs São Paulo: Two Utilities, One Answer

Brazil hands the choice of voltage to the company that wires your street, which is why there is no national figure — that principle, and the two values it picks from. This page does the case: the two cities most visitors combine.

What Rio's utility publishes

Light supplies the city of Rio de Janeiro, its metro area and part of the state's interior. Its RECON-BT 2026 — the 405-page rulebook for low-voltage connections — lists every nominal voltage it will deliver, and there are four.

The first two rows are the city. The last is the exception, and Note 2 keeps it small: 380/220 V exists only where the medium-voltage network runs at 13.2 kV, at the consumer's request, over a dedicated underground system. It is something a building asks for, not something a street has.

What São Paulo's utility publishes

São Paulo is Enel's, and the document is Technical Specification 0017, version 02, dated 6 March 2025. Its Table 1 is a grid with three concession areas side by side — Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Ceará — so a single page carries both a 127 V answer and a 220 V one.

São Paulo's column reads 127/220V on the secondary aerial three-phase star network, and 120/240 V on the two-phase urban delta system. Ceará's column, in the same row, reads 220/380V.

The exceptions ride in the notes. São Paulo has an old reticulated underground network at 120/208 V, and cases of 220/380 V. The rule is 127 V; the standard is the source for both halves of that sentence.

Same number, written backwards

Put the two documents next to each other and they look like a disagreement. Light writes 220/127 V. Enel writes 127/220V. It is the same network.

Enel's table settles it in its own words, printing (fase-neutro/fase-fase) — phase-to-neutral, then phase-to-phase — beside the value. Light's list uses the opposite convention, naming the higher figure first. A domestic socket is fed phase to neutral, so both describe one wall: 127 V at the outlet, 220 V between phases.

Read the pair in the wrong order and you would conclude that Rio is 220 V and São Paulo is 127 V, which is neither city. This is the specific way this comparison goes wrong, and it goes wrong from primary sources.

"Enel Rio" is not the city of Rio

Enel's Table 1 has a column headed Rio de Janeiro, and it is not the capital. Enel Distribuição Rio is the former Ampla: Niterói, São Gonçalo, Petrópolis, and the Região dos Lagos — Búzios, Cabo Frio, Arraial do Cabo. The city itself is Light's.

The number survives the mix-up, because both read 127 V at the socket. The citation does not. Your hotel in Rio and your day trip to Petrópolis fall under two different companies, and two standards that happen to agree. Quote Enel for Copacabana and you have quoted the wrong document. Rent a car for the Região dos Lagos and you cross a concession boundary long before a voltage one.

What actually changes when you cross

Between these two cities, nothing at the wall. The Brazilian phrase to search for, if you want to check a third city, is tensão de fornecimento — the supply voltage a utility publishes for a locality.

Exactly 127 V is not what your device meets, either. ANEEL, the electricity regulator, publishes the reading band it considers adequate on a 220/127 V network: 117 V to 133 V. A socket at 118 V and a socket at 132 V are both compliant, in Rio and in São Paulo alike.

What does change is the leg you add. Elsewhere the answer flips at a municipal boundary — a single utility file for Bahia sorts 299 localities into 220 V and 118 into 127 V, the case the sibling guide works through. Between these two, the things worth planning are ordinary: getting from GRU into São Paulo, a working phone number or an eSIM bought before you land, and how rides are paid for.

Sources

• Light — RECON-BT 2026, the list of nominal low-voltage supplies for the Rio de Janeiro concession area and its Note 2 on the dedicated underground exception (accessed September 2, 2026)
• Enel — Technical Specification 0017, version 02 of 6 March 2025, Table 1 on pages 18-19, with the São Paulo column and the notes carrying the 120/208 V and 220/380 V exceptions (accessed September 2, 2026)
• ANEEL — PRODIST Module 8, Tables 4 and 5, for the adequate reading bands. Taken from ANEEL's public GitLab, which serves the module as a plain PDF; the agency's own document archive answers with a bot challenge (accessed September 2, 2026)
• Neoenergia — the per-municipality file for Bahia, dated August 2025, the only city-level map of this data we opened (accessed September 2, 2026)

Method on how we research; Jeff Bruno writes from Curitiba. Next door: Brazil basics, all guides.

What we could not verify

• Where the exceptions sit inside either city. Both standards register networks that are not 127 V — Rio's dedicated 380/220 V underground, São Paulo's 120/208 V reticulated underground — and neither gives a street, a district or a building. Light's Note 2 gives a condition, not an address list.
• Whether Light or Enel publishes a lookup by address. The only city-level file we opened in this survey is Coelba's, for Bahia. We did not search Light's or Enel's own customer portals for an equivalent, so this is where we stopped, not a statement that none exists.
• The rest of both states. Light covers the capital, its metro area and part of the interior of Rio de Janeiro; the Enel document covers its own concession areas. Other distributors operate in both states, and we did not open their standards. Nothing here is a state map.