Brazil visa requirements and entry rules

Which passports need a visa, and which do not

It depends on the passport, not on where you live or where the flight leaves from. Three groups cover almost everyone who travels with us.

If your passport is from somewhere else, check it against the official portal rather than against a blog, ours included. Brazil's entry rules move with diplomatic agreements, and the waiver these three countries lost had already been extended twice before it ended.

• Germany, Austria, Switzerland and most of the EU. No visa, for stays of up to 90 days. Nothing to apply for, nothing to pay, and no reason to give money to a site that says otherwise.
• United States. E-visa required for tourism, business and transit since 10 April 2025. Valid ten years, multiple entry, counted from the date of approval rather than from your first entry.
• Canada and Australia. Same date, same portal, same US$80.90 fee. The difference is the validity, which is five years rather than ten.

If you hold a German, Austrian or Swiss passport

You need no visa. You arrive, an officer stamps the passport and you may stay up to 90 days within any 180 day window. That window matters more than people expect: it is not 90 days per entry but 90 days per half year, so a second trip in the same period counts against the same allowance.

Bring the passport, the onward ticket and an address for your first night. Border officers ask for the address more often than anything else, and having a hotel booking on the phone saves a conversation.

If you hold a US, Canadian or Australian passport

Brazil ran a visa waiver for these three countries from 2019 until 10 April 2025. It has gone back to the reciprocity rule it applied before, so the country that asks Brazilians for a visa gets asked for one in return.

The replacement is entirely online, and it is nothing like the consulate appointment that phrase brings to mind. There is no interview and no passport to post: you apply on the portal, upload a photo and your passport page, pay by card, and the visa arrives by email, linked electronically to your passport.

The rest of this page is the detail of that process, in the order you will meet it.

What it costs, and what the fee does not include

The fee is US$80.90 per applicant, paid by card at the moment you submit. Every traveller needs their own application, including children, and each one costs the same.

Two things about that number are worth knowing before you pay it. It is non refundable, so a rejected or abandoned application costs exactly what an approved one costs. And it is the complete official cost. There is no separate issuing fee, no courier charge and no expedited tier that the government sells.

Anything quoted above US$80.90 is somebody's service charge for typing your details into the same form you can reach yourself. Those services are legal and some people genuinely want them. The form takes about twenty minutes and asks for nothing you do not already know off the top of your head.

What the application asks for

Six things. Collecting them before you open the form saves starting over, because the session times out and hunting for a hotel confirmation halfway through is how people end up doing it twice.

• Your passport, signed, with at least two blank pages. It has to be valid for the whole of your stay. Check the signature box as well, an unsigned passport is a routine rejection reason.
• A colour scan of the photo page. Flat, in focus, all four corners visible, and no glare from a kitchen ceiling light.
• A passport style photo on a white background. 3.5 by 4.5 centimetres, taken recently. A US passport photo works if the background behind you is plain white.
• Proof of accommodation. A hotel booking, or a letter of invitation from a host in Brazil. If we are planning your trip, this is the confirmation we send you.
• Proof of onward or return travel. In practice that is your return ticket or the itinerary that contains it.
• A card that works internationally. Credit or debit, for the fee itself.

How to apply, step by step

The whole sequence runs in one sitting on a laptop. A phone works, but the upload steps are fiddlier than they need to be.

Enter your name exactly as the passport prints it, with every middle name and every accent. A mismatch there is the most common reason an application comes back, well ahead of anything to do with the documents themselves.

1. Go to brazil.vfsevisa.com and nowhere else. This is the portal operated for the Brazilian government by VFS Global. Type the address rather than following a search advert, because the paid results above the real one are the entire business model of the copycat sites.
2. Create an account and choose the tourist visa. Business and transit are separate options on the same form. A holiday needs the tourist one.
3. Enter your details exactly as the passport prints them. Full name, no nicknames, no dropped middle name, the same spelling and the same accents.
4. Upload the scan and the photo. Then the accommodation and the onward travel documents.
5. Pay the US$80.90 by card and submit. Save the confirmation number that appears on screen, it is how you track the application afterwards.
6. Wait for the approval email, then print it. The visa is a PDF, and airline check in staff outside Brazil are the ones most likely to ask to see it. Keep a copy on your phone and a copy on paper.

How long approval takes, and when to apply

Most approvals come back within 48 to 72 hours. The official processing window runs to about ten working days, and the longer end is real in the weeks before Carnival and around the December holidays, when the queue is full of people who booked in November.

Our recommendation is two to three weeks before departure. That is late enough that your travel dates are settled and early enough to absorb a request for a better photo, which is the most common thing that adds a few days.

Do not let anyone ticket your internal Brazilian flights before the approval email is in your inbox. Domestic fares here are cheap and almost entirely non refundable, which is a bad combination to discover in the wrong order.

What the e-visa lets you do, and what it does not

It is a tourist, business and transit document. It is not a work permit, not a student visa and not a route to residence, and none of those can be fixed after arrival by anyone at the airport.

• Multiple entries. One approval covers as many trips as you want inside the validity period, which matters if you are combining Brazil with Argentina or Uruguay and crossing back.
• Up to 90 days per entry. That is the maximum an officer can grant, not an automatic allowance.
• A hard ceiling of 180 days in any twelve month period. Leaving and re-entering does not reset it, which is the rule that catches people planning a long southern summer.
• Extensions exist, but they are a separate process. The Polícia Federal can grant a further 90 days inside that same annual ceiling, for a fee they set in reais. Apply before your current stay expires, not after.

The requirements people are certain about that do not exist

Three of these come up in nearly every planning call, and all three are either outdated or invented.

The US$2,000 in your bank account. There is no fixed sum Brazil asks tourists to prove. The application asks you to show you can support yourself, and a normal statement or a credit card does that.

The yellow fever certificate. Brazil does not require one to enter from the United States or from Europe. The vaccination is recommended for the Amazon and parts of the Pantanal for your own sake, and some neighbouring countries ask for proof if you travel onward from Brazil, which is where the confusion started. Take that advice from a travel clinic, not from an entry rule.

The visa on arrival. There is no such thing for these passports. If you land without the approval, the airline should already have stopped you at check in, and that is the better outcome of the two.

One rule that does exist and gets missed: a minor who holds Brazilian citizenship, including a dual national child, needs written authorisation from any parent not travelling along, in Portuguese and notarised in a form the Federal Police accept. If that is your family, start it early, because it is the one item on this page that cannot be done in an evening.

Should you let an agency handle it?

Honestly, no. Not this part. We plan private, tailor made trips in Brazil and we do not file visa applications for guests, because it is a form you fill in better than we can, with documents that live in your own filing cabinet.

What we do is remove the reasons it goes wrong. Your accommodation confirmations arrive from us in one email, in the format the portal wants. Your itinerary shows the onward travel. And we will tell you plainly when your travel window is too close for comfort.

Ask any agency you are talking to what they charge for visa help. If a number comes back for something that costs US$80.90 and twenty minutes, you have learned something useful about how the rest of their pricing works.

What actually happens on arrival

Arrival is undramatic. Immigration at the big airports is usually quick, and many now use automatic gates for passports with a chip. There is no arrival form to fill in on the plane.

Customs is a green and red channel system. The limits worth knowing are the duty free allowance on goods you bring in and the rule that cash above the equivalent of R$10,000 must be declared. Nobody will ask about your camera or your laptop.

Keep the approval on your phone and on paper until you are through. After that, the passport is the document that matters, because the visa is linked to it electronically.

Common questions

Where this matters on a trip

• Health, vaccinations and staying well
• How we plan a trip