Investing in Brazil as a Non-Resident: the Rules That Changed — and the Guides That Didn't

Published August 18, 2026. Also available in Portuguese.

If you are researching how to invest in Brazil as a non-resident, the first thing to know is that the subject has a shelf-life problem. The access regime that a decade of guides was built on was revoked with effect from January 1, 2025 — and in January 2026 a second change ended a decades-old exemption on dividends. Any guide written before this year will tell you that Brazilian dividends are tax-free for foreign investors. Since January 1, 2026, they are not.

The short version: yes, you can invest in Brazil while living abroad — whether you are a foreigner who has never lived there or a former resident who left. The current framework is simpler than the old one: individuals were expressly waived from the two requirements that used to scare people away. The R$ 2 million figure that circulates online is a cap on a waiver, not an entry ticket — and reading it backwards makes people give up for no reason. The R$ 10 million figure belongs to a different subject entirely: as a non-resident, you are already classified as a professional investor by definition. And there are two genuine gray areas in the rules, which this article declares openly instead of hiding.

One boundary before we start: this article is about the investment regime — access, representatives, taxation, exemptions and prohibitions. It is not about opening the bank account itself, and nothing here is investment advice: we explain rules; we do not recommend products, banks or brokers. To invest you will need a CPF (the Brazilian taxpayer number) — a practical step that is part of our non-resident tax practice.

The regime half the internet still cites was revoked

For a decade, the rulebook for foreign investment in Brazilian financial markets was CMN Resolution No. 4,373 of September 29, 2014 — you will still see references to a "4373 account" or the "4.373 regime" all over the internet. That rule is dead, and the death certificate is literal: Joint Resolution BCB/CVM No. 13 of December 3, 2024, issued by the Central Bank of Brazil and the Brazilian Securities and Exchange Commission (CVM), revoked Resolution 4,373 in its article 27, item III. Article 28 sets the date: the new regime has been in force since January 1, 2025.

This was not a patch — the same article 27 revoked seven other instruments in whole or in part. It was a rebuild of the framework. So when a guide, a banker or a well-meaning forum reply tells you to "open a 4373 account", you are hearing the old law. The right question to ask anyone advising you on Brazil is simple: which article, of which rule, as of what date?

What Joint Resolution 13/2024 changed — and what it didn't

The new regime opens with a principle that inverts the burden of the conversation:

"Non-resident investment in the financial market and in the securities market shall be carried out in the same financial instruments and modalities available to the resident investor, with equivalent registration requirements and operational limits, subject to trading-venue limitations and others expressly set out in regulation." (Joint Resolution BCB/CVM 13/2024, article 5 — author's translation)

In other words: the rule does not list what a non-resident may buy — it says the menu is the same, and whoever claims a product is off-limits must point to the specific provision that says so.

Two things did not change. First, the general rule of access is still double and prior: under article 6, a non-resident investor must (i) appoint one or more representatives in Brazil and (ii) register with the CVM before starting to operate. Second, this regime does not replace the foreign-exchange layer: article 1, sole paragraph, expressly requires compliance with the FX regulations as well. They are two stacked layers — securities access and currency flow — and confusing them is the origin of half the confusion we untangle in consultations.

Also worth pinning down: "investor", in this Joint Resolution, expressly includes the individual — article 3, item I, defines investor as "the natural or legal person, funds and other collective investment vehicles". This is not a rule written only for institutions.

Individuals are now the easy case — and almost nobody says so

Here is the provision that changes everything for the individual investor, and that we have rarely seen explained correctly in English. Article 16 of the Joint Resolution waives the non-resident individual from the two requirements of article 6, as follows:

• Representative — waived in three situations: (a) investments in securities, including from a non-resident account in Brazilian reais held in the investor's own name with their own funds; (b) investments in financial assets made from such a non-resident account in reais; and (c) investments in financial assets not made from that account, up to R$ 2,000,000 in monthly contributions per intermediary;
• CVM registration — waived for the individual altogether, subject to the registration data required by the CVM itself (article 16, item II).

Read the three sub-items side by side, because the common misreading lives between them. The R$ 2 million cap appears in one sub-item only — "c" — precisely the situation where the money does not flow through the non-resident account in reais. In situations "a" and "b" there is no cap on the waiver at all. That is why the non-resident bank account matters so much: it is the key that unlocks the waiver without any amount limit.

And when the cap does apply, it is a cap on the waiver, not a floor for entry — the single most expensive misreading of this subject. Exceeding R$ 2 million in monthly contributions per intermediary does not prohibit anything: it simply returns you to the general rule, representative plus registration. Nobody is barred for being too big, and nobody needs to be big to get in.

Three fine points from the same article that decide real cases. Investments in the Tesouro Direto government-bond program must additionally follow that program's own procedures and limits (article 16, § 1). The intermediary is the one who controls the monthly cap, investor by investor (§ 2) — which is why two brokers can give different answers about the same limit without either being wrong. And the waiver belongs to the individual: investing through a company abroad, even your own, falls under a narrower door (article 14), where securities return to the general rule of article 6.

The R$ 10 million myth: you are already a professional investor

A question we hear constantly: "do I need R$ 10 million to invest in Brazil as a non-resident?" The answer is no, and the origin of the confusion can be traced to a specific provision. CVM Resolution No. 30 of May 11, 2021 — Brazil's suitability rule — lists in article 11 who qualifies as a professional investor. Item IV covers natural or legal persons holding financial investments above R$ 10 million who additionally attest their status in writing, under the form of Annex A. That is not your door. Item VIII of the same article lists "non-resident investors" — by definition, with no asset floor, no declaration, no waiting period. You walk in already classified.

This classification cuts both ways, and we say so in the first conversation. It widens access — products restricted to professional investors become available. And it lowers the guardrails: the suitability duties an institution owes a retail investor are reduced for a professional one. A wider door, with fewer handrails.

Three different "representatives" — and a conflict nobody has resolved

Few words cause more damage in this field than "representative", because it names three distinct figures from three distinct rules:

• The regulatory representative (Joint Resolution 13/2024, articles 6-7): not a person you trust, but an institution — a financial institution or an entity authorized by the Central Bank; representation, custody and intermediation may accumulate in the same entity.
• The tax representative (Normative Instruction RFB 1,585/2015, article 85, § 2): the figure who answers for tax under article 128 of the Brazilian Tax Code, with liability limited to net gains (§ 3).
• The rental-income attorney-in-fact: the person who withholds the monthly tax on Brazilian rent paid to a non-resident owner — a different taxable event under different rules, covered in our real estate practice.

That the first two are different is not our interpretation — the Joint Resolution itself says, in article 7, sole paragraph, that its representative "is not necessarily the same as the representative indicated in tax legislation".

Now the honest part. The FX/securities rule waives the individual from appointing a representative in the situations of article 16. The tax rule — IN RFB 1,585/2015, article 85, § 2 — still says that foreign investment "may only be carried out in Brazil through a legal representative". Both provisions remain in force; both say different things about the same arrangement; and no rule expressly reconciles them. There is a reasonable technical explanation — they operate on different normative planes, market access versus tax liability — and the market operates, in practice, on the basis of the waiver. But we do not resolve that conflict in a blog article, and we distrust anyone who does. In an engagement, we map which waiver applies to your case, what your intermediary requires as internal policy, and what the actual exposure of each arrangement is. Declaring a gray area is more useful than pretending it does not exist.

How your investments are taxed — and the caveat that must come attached

Non-resident taxation of financial investments sits in Chapter III of Normative Instruction RFB 1,585/2015, and it has two floors.

The lower floor is the general rule (article 85): except as provided in the special regime, non-residents are subject to the same taxation rules as Brazilian residents for fixed income, funds and net gains on the exchange.

The upper floor is the special regime (articles 88-91), where the rates improve: 10% for equity funds, swaps and certain off-exchange futures; 15% in the remaining cases, including fixed income (article 89); no income tax on capital gains earned by these investors (article 90 — its § 1 covers the exchange and gold traded off-exchange); and zero rate on federal government bonds acquired since February 16, 2006 (article 91).

Everyone wants the upper floor — and here lives the most serious gray area of this subject. Articles 88 and 91 condition the special regime on operating "in accordance with the rules and conditions established by the CMN" (the National Monetary Council). Today's regime, however, is a Joint Resolution of the Central Bank and the CVM — and we have not located any act of the Brazilian federal revenue service updating that cross-reference. The same wording exists at the statutory level: article 81, § 5 of Law 8,981/1995 confines that article to entities meeting the rules and conditions established by the National Monetary Council. Precision requires the caveat: article 81 has entities as its subjects — funds, investment companies, portfolios — and we do not assert that it governs the individual directly. We assert only the narrow, verifiable proposition: the cross-reference sits in the statute as well as in the normative instruction, and today's regulator is a different one. That is what makes this serious — it is not an outdated normative instruction the revenue service can fix with a stroke of the pen; it is a cross-reference that runs through the statutory plane. For that reason, we do not assert automatic qualification for the special tax regime, and we recommend that nobody assert it without this caveat. Until an express act appears, the correct posture is to treat the applicable rate as a point to confirm in the concrete transaction — not a number memorized from a blog post, including this one.

Living in a low-tax jurisdiction changes the regime — but not everything

If you live in a jurisdiction Brazil classifies as having favored taxation (the Brazilian "tax haven" list, article 1 of Normative Instruction RFB 1,037/2010, under article 24 of Law 9,430/1996), article 88 excludes you from the special regime: you drop to the general rule and are taxed like a resident, losing the zero rate on government bonds and the exchange capital-gains relief.

But it is not all or nothing, and this is the part almost nobody tells. Article 85, § 4 (as amended by IN RFB 1,637/2016) provides that the exemptions of article 40 and article 55, items I to IV, reach individuals resident abroad "including in a country with favored taxation". The word including is deliberate: the same investor who loses the special regime keeps the exemptions on the instruments listed in the next section. Planning as if it were all-or-nothing produces wrong decisions in both directions.

Keep two cautions in mind. The list is dynamic — it changes by administrative act, so never decide from a memorized list: Singapore left it in 2017 (IN RFB 1,773/2017) and the United Arab Emirates — Dubai — left it in 2025 (IN RFB 2,265/2025). And the test of article 24 of Law 9,430/1996 is objective: your reasons for living where you live are irrelevant to it. If your country has a double-tax treaty with Brazil, that adds an entire further layer of analysis.

What remains tax-exempt — and the 2025 scare that died

There is a set of Brazilian instruments whose income-tax exemption expressly reaches individuals resident abroad — larger than most people imagine:

A historical note that still generates calls. In 2025, alarm spread — legitimately — that LCI, LCA, CRI and CRA would become taxable under Provisional Measure 1,303/2025. It never became law: the measure lapsed, and the official federal legislation repository records it as no longer effective. The exemptions above remain intact. With one candid caveat: instrument exemptions are tax policy, and tax policy changes — that attempt died when its deadline expired, not by conviction. Building a ten-year portfolio around an exemption means accepting real legislative risk; better to accept it knowingly.

Dividends: the change that took effect in January 2026

If you read only one section of this article, make it this one.

For almost thirty years — since Law 9,249/1995 — dividends paid by Brazilian companies were exempt from withholding tax. For anyone abroad, that ended on January 1, 2026. Article 3 of Law No. 15,270 of November 26, 2025 rewrote article 10 of Law 9,249/1995:

"§ 4. Profits or dividends paid, credited, delivered, employed or remitted abroad shall be subject to withholding income tax at the rate of 10% (ten percent)." (Law 9,249/1995, article 10, § 4, as amended by article 3 of Law 15,270/2025 — author's translation)

And it is not only the new paragraph: the rewritten head paragraph now reserves the exemption for beneficiaries "domiciled in Brazil". The law was published in the official gazette on November 27, 2025 and, per its article 8, produces effects from January 1, 2026.

When the firm reviewed the leading English-language search results on this subject in August 2026, the most prominent investor guide still described Brazilian dividends as tax-free, and the leading international tax summary had last been reviewed months before the change took effect. Check the date on anything you read about Brazilian taxation — including this article.

There is a transition rule, and its requirements are cumulative: § 5, I protects dividends from results assessed up to calendar year 2025 whose distribution was approved by December 31, 2025 and which are enforceable under corporate law, paid as originally scheduled. Old profits alone are not enough. Paragraph 5, II excepts three beneficiaries — foreign governments with reciprocity, sovereign wealth funds and foreign pension-benefit entities — and the ordinary individual investor is none of them.

Two traps to close the topic. First, do not confuse this with the R$ 50,000 domestic rule: the same Law 15,270/2025 created a separate 10% withholding on dividends above R$ 50,000 per month paid by one company to one Brazilian-resident individual — different provision, different taxpayer, and the foreign-remittance rule has no minimum: § 4 applies regardless of amount. Second, article 10-A offers a relief credit when the combined burden exceeds the nominal corporate rates, at the option of the beneficiary abroad — but its § 2 delegates the mechanics to a regulation which we had not verified as issued at the time of writing. The mechanism exists in the statute; the practical avenue depends on an act we do not confirm here. And if your country has a tax treaty with Brazil, the analysis gains another layer we do not resolve in this article.

The plumbing rules that sink arrangements

The Joint Resolution is permissive about the menu and rigid about the plumbing. The prohibitions are few and specific — which is exactly why they catch arrangements built in good faith:

• No settlement through foreign accounts (article 13): payments, receipts and financial movements of these investments must run through Brazil. Trying to receive a redemption directly in your account abroad puts you on the wrong side of the rule (narrow exceptions exist for certain agricultural derivatives).
• No investing residents' money (article 15): using your non-resident account in reais to invest funds belonging to a Brazilian resident — the classic "relative uses my account" arrangement — is expressly prohibited.
• Securities trade in organized markets (article 10), and transfers of investments outside the forms provided in regulation are barred (article 11) — which ends the idea of "just moving the shares into someone's name" outside the system.

And the provision that explains the paperwork experience every client reports: article 23 delegates the documentation to each institution's internal policy. There is no official universal document list for the non-resident investor — which is why two brokers demand different things without either being wrong — and the records must be kept for ten years after redemption (§ 1), at the disposal of the Central Bank and the CVM. Excellent reason for the file to be right from the start.

"I already had investments in Brazil when my status changed"

Common scenario: you lived in Brazil — as a Brazilian or as an expatriate — built positions, and then moved abroad. Must you liquidate? No, and the rule is express:

"Upon the change of the investor's resident or non-resident status, investments in the financial market and in the securities market may continue under the conditions originally agreed, with no need for redemption or closing of the position." (Joint Resolution BCB/CVM 13/2024, article 12 — author's translation)

The paragraphs assign the roles: you are responsible for informing the institutions of the status change (§ 1), and the institution must update your registration and make the new condition's procedures available (§ 3). In one line: the duty is to inform, not to liquidate. We regularly see the opposite error — panic redemption before moving — which realizes gains, prepays tax that was not due, and throws away accrued benefits, only to face rebuilding the position later under a new registration. Note also that Brazil has two distinct concepts of "non-resident" — the FX one and the tax one — which do not always switch on the same date; aligning them is part of the planning.

Five mistakes we keep seeing

1. Liquidating everything before moving, "to simplify". The most expensive and most common. No rule requires it — article 12 says the opposite.

2. Believing in the R$ 10 million or R$ 2 million "minimums". Two numbers from two different subjects, and neither is an entry floor: the first is another category's threshold in the suitability rule; the second is a cap on a waiver that often does not even apply to your situation.

3. Treating "representative" as one thing. It is three. Hiring the wrong one spends money without covering risk; skipping the necessary one leaves exposure open — and the regulatory/tax conflict described above is real.

4. Collecting dividends as if they were still exempt. Since January 1, 2026, dividends remitted abroad suffer 10% withholding. If your passive-income plan for Brazilian stocks was designed before that date and never reviewed, it is out of date.

5. Accepting a verbal "we can't work with you" from an institution. Article 23 makes document requirements a matter of each institution's internal policy — so a refusal is a commercial decision, not a legal prohibition. Ask for it in writing and ask which policy supports it; many "definitive" refusals collapse one level up.

In practice, our sequence is always the same, and the order matters more than speed: fix your status on both planes (FX and tax); inventory what already exists, instrument by instrument; classify each holding under the regime that actually reaches it, declaring the gray areas instead of hiding them; notify in writing and keep protocols; and only then discuss what to do next. That is the engagement we run in our non-resident taxation practice.

Frequently asked questions

About the author

Luiz Alberto de Carvalho Barros Filho

Attorney at Law — Brazilian Bar (OAB/AL 7.530)

Brazilian attorney dedicated to private international law and cross-border taxation. Published author in the International Law Deskbook 2.0 (The Florida Bar) and contributor to the International Law Quarterly, also of The Florida Bar.

More about the firm

Legal note. This article is informational and does not replace individual legal advice. Nothing here constitutes investment advice, recommendation or analysis, and no financial institution, broker, fund or product is being recommended: the text describes rules. The provisions supporting it — Joint Resolution BCB/CVM No. 13 of December 3, 2024 (articles 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 23, 27 and 28); CVM Resolution No. 30/2021 (article 11, items IV and VIII); Normative Instruction RFB No. 1,585/2015, Chapter III (articles 40, 55, 85, 88, 89, 90 and 91), as amended by IN RFB No. 1,637/2016; Law No. 9,249/1995 (article 10, head paragraph and §§ 4 and 5, and article 10-A, as amended by article 3 of Law No. 15,270 of November 26, 2025); Law No. 15,270/2025 (articles 3 and 8); Law No. 8,981/1995 (article 81, § 5); Law No. 9,430/1996 (article 24); Law No. 5,172/1966 — Brazilian Tax Code (article 128); Normative Instruction RFB No. 1,037/2010 (article 1), as amended by INs RFB No. 1,773/2017 and No. 2,265/2025; and Provisional Measure No. 1,303/2025, verified as lapsed — were checked against official sources or qualified specialized mirrors in August 2026, with the relevant articles indicated throughout the text. Passages shown in quotation marks are the author's working translation of the Portuguese originals; the Portuguese text of each provision is the only authoritative version, and any emphasis within them is the author's. Method caveats. The Brazilian federal revenue service's norms portal does not answer automated queries: Normative Instruction RFB 1,585/2015 — the backbone of the tax sections of this article — was verified against two convergent specialized mirrors (a full reproduction and ANBIMA's official comparative table), not against the revenue service's own published text; the statutes were checked against the official federal legislation text, and the CVM rules against the regulator's own files. The statement about English-language search results reflects the firm's own documented review of the leading results on this subject, conducted in August 2026. This is an adaptation, for an international audience, of the firm's Portuguese-language article on the same subject, whose verification record it inherits. Two gray areas are declared in the body and were not resolved by inference: (i) the cross-reference of articles 88 and 91 of IN RFB 1,585/2015 (and, at the statutory level, article 81, § 5 of Law 8,981/1995) to CMN rules, while the current regime is a Joint Resolution of the Central Bank and the CVM, which is why no automatic qualification for the special tax regime is asserted; and (ii) the coexistence of the representative requirement of article 85, § 2 of IN RFB 1,585/2015 with the waiver of article 16, I of the Joint Resolution, with no rule expressly reconciling the two. The relief credit of article 10-A of Law 9,249/1995 depends on a regulation whose issuance was not verified, and the list of favored-taxation jurisdictions is dynamic. No court decision was read in full and the article contains no case-law citation. No promise of results is made (Brazilian Bar Provision OAB No. 205/2021). To review your specific case, contact attorney Luiz Barros — Brazilian Bar, OAB/AL 7.530.