Selling Property in Brazil as a Non-Resident: Who Withholds the Tax, What Is Actually Taxed, and How the Money Leaves

Published August 22, 2026.

If you live abroad and you are selling an apartment, a house or a plot of land in Brazil, there is a sentence in a 2003 statute that decides more about your closing than anything else you will read: the person the law makes responsible for withholding and paying the tax on your gain is the buyer, not you — and the money is due on the day of the sale, not in the month that follows. Across the twelve English-language pages we read on this subject in August 2026, not one cited that provision. Three of them got the answer right anyway; none could tell you where it comes from, which is a different kind of problem.

The short version. Brazil taxes the gain, not the price. The gain is computed under the rules that apply to a Brazilian resident — the same statute says so in one line — but with the resident's exemptions and reduction factors stripped out by a provision most sellers meet for the first time after the sale. The rate is progressive, from 15% to 22.5%, although one unamended 2002 instruction still says 15% flat, which is why the guides you are reading contradict each other. And once the tax is settled, a second and entirely separate problem starts: getting the money out of the country. Eleven of the twelve pages stop at the tax.

One boundary before we start. This article is about a non-resident individual selling real property located in Brazil. It is not about renting it out, which is a different mechanism with a different responsible party and a different deadline; it is not about shares traded on the Brazilian exchange, which sit in their own regime; and it is not about companies. Where it touches those, it says so and points elsewhere.

Who actually pays it — and it is probably not you

Almost every conversation we have about a Brazilian sale starts from the wrong premise: that the seller calculates the tax and pays it. For a seller who lives abroad, Brazilian law puts the duty somewhere else, and it is worth reading the provision in full because it also answers the follow-up question everybody asks second.

"Article 26. The acquirer, a natural or legal person resident or domiciled in Brazil, or the attorney-in-fact, where the acquirer is resident or domiciled abroad, shall be responsible for withholding and paying the income tax levied on the capital gain referred to in article 18 of Law No. 9,249 of December 26, 1995, earned by a natural or legal person resident or domiciled abroad who disposes of assets located in Brazil." (Law No. 10,833 of December 29, 2003, article 26 — author's working translation)

That is the whole article. It has no paragraphs and no exceptions, and it has been producing effects since February 1, 2004, under article 93, item II of the same law. Three things follow from it.

First, the Brazilian buyer is a withholding agent, whether or not they know it. In practice this means the tax comes off the price at closing rather than arriving as a bill afterward. A buyer who pays you the full amount and lets you "take care of the tax later" has not done you a favor — they have taken on a liability that the statute placed on them, and the revenue service will eventually come looking for them.

Second, if your buyer is also a foreigner living abroad, the duty moves to that buyer's attorney-in-fact in Brazil. This is the configuration nobody plans for, and it is more common than it sounds: a foreign owner selling to a foreign buyer, with a Brazilian lawyer or agent holding the buyer's power of attorney. The Brazilian tax regulation makes the point explicitly, adding that the tax is due "including where the acquirer is resident or domiciled abroad" (Income Tax Regulation, approved by Decree No. 9,580/2018, article 745, § 2), and it lists the situation among the attorney-in-fact's own duties, in article 781, item III. If you are on the buying side of that arrangement, the person you gave a power of attorney to is carrying a tax obligation on your behalf. That is a conversation to have before the deed, not after. And if the purchase is meant to anchor a residence permit — the so-called golden visa route — the rules and the tax clock around it are the subject of a dedicated article.

Third — and this is where the older material misleads — two Brazilian instructions predating that statute say something different. Normative Instruction SRF 208/2002 provides that the tax is "paid by the seller or their attorney-in-fact on the date of the disposal" (article 27, item II), and Normative Instruction SRF 84/2001 says the same, assigning payment to the "attorney-in-fact of the seller, in the seller's name, where the seller is a non-resident" (article 30, item II). Both are earlier than Law 10,833/2003, and both are administrative instructions rather than statute. We are not going to tell you they were silently repealed — no act says so, and we do not infer repeals. What we can say is that the statute is later and higher, that the 2018 regulation follows the statute, and that in a real closing the buyer withholds.

One operational detail from the older instruction survives all of this and is genuinely useful: where the non-resident seller has no CPF, the tax payment form is issued under the attorney-in-fact's own number (Normative Instruction SRF 84/2001, article 30, § 1). The Brazilian system always wants a natural person with a Brazilian number attached to the payment — which is why you want a CPF long before the closing, for reasons we come back to below.

How widely known is any of this? We read the leading English-language results on this subject in August 2026 — twelve pages, all reachable, all read in full. None cited Law 10,833/2003, article 26. Three stated correctly that the buyer withholds, without naming the source. Only three cited a Brazilian rule by number at all. We are not claiming a survey of the internet; we report what we read and the month we read it. The count matters because a rule you cannot locate is a rule you cannot check.

15%, or 15% to 22.5%? Two Brazilian sources, two answers

Eight of the twelve pages we read commit to a rate. Four say the non-resident pays a flat 15%; four say the rate runs on a progressive scale from 15% to 22.5%. That is not carelessness on anybody's part. Both camps are reading a real Brazilian source. Here is the part none of the eight explains.

The chain that produces the progressive answer has three links, and each is more specific than the last.

• The statute is one sentence: "The capital gain earned by a person resident or domiciled abroad shall be assessed and taxed in accordance with the rules applicable to residents in the country" (Law No. 9,249/1995, article 18 — author's working translation). It sends you to the resident's rules and stops.
• The resident's rules have been progressive since the 2017 tax year. Article 21 of Law No. 8,981/1995, as rewritten by Law No. 13,259/2016, sets 15% on the portion of the gain up to R$ 5 million, 17.5% between R$ 5 million and R$ 10 million, 20% between R$ 10 million and R$ 30 million, and 22.5% above R$ 30 million. The brackets apply to the gain, not the sale price, and each slice is taxed at its own rate.
• The regulation says so for non-residents directly: article 745 of the Income Tax Regulation repeats the statutory sentence and then adds that the gain "shall be subject to income tax with the application of the rates provided for in article 153" — article 153 being the progressive table.

And there is a fourth source that settles the practical question, because it is the revenue service's own operating manual rather than anyone's interpretation of the rules. The MAFON — the manual for withholding income tax, published by Brazil's federal revenue service — carries an entry for the revenue code used for income of persons resident abroad. Under that entry, after listing the ordinary rates for other kinds of income, it states plainly: "In the case of capital gain, the rate shall be: I – 15% on the portion of the gains not exceeding R$ 5,000,000.00; II – 17.5% […]; III – 20% […]; or IV – 22.5% on the portion of the gains exceeding R$ 30,000,000.00" (MAFON 2024, code 0473 — author's working translation). The same entry states, among its observations, that beneficiaries resident or domiciled abroad are subject, as regards capital gain on the disposal of assets and rights, to the same taxation rules as beneficiaries resident in the country.

So where does the flat 15% come from? From a real provision, still on the books, never amended on this point: Normative Instruction SRF 208/2002, article 27, item I, which says the tax on the capital gain is "determined at the rate of fifteen percent, save for the existence of an agreement, treaty or convention entered into between Brazil and the seller's country of residence". That text was written in 2002 — fourteen years before the progressive brackets existed. We checked it against a mirror carrying amendment stamps: there is no amendment note on article 27. The article immediately after it does carry a repeal note, which is how we know the source marks changes when there are any.

Our position, and it is the one the firm's Portuguese-language articles already take: the rate is progressive. A statute, a decree and the revenue service's own manual say so; a single unamended 2002 instruction says otherwise. The reason the error is so durable is that it is almost always harmless — the overwhelming majority of residential sales land entirely inside the first bracket, and the answer is 15% either way. It stops being harmless at exactly the moment it matters most: a large gain, where the difference between "flat 15%" and the real scale is a number with six figures in it.

One rate that is not in dispute: if the beneficiary is resident or domiciled in a country or dependency with favored taxation — the low-tax jurisdictions defined by reference to article 24 of Law No. 9,430/1996 — the gain is taxed at 25% (Law 10,833/2003, article 47; Regulation, article 745, § 4). That list is dynamic and is set by a separate instruction, so it has to be checked against the version in force on the date of your sale rather than against any list printed in an article.

The deadline is the day of the sale

This is the single most expensive detail in the whole subject, because it is invisible until it has already been missed. A Brazilian resident who sells property pays the tax "by the last business day of the month following the one in which the gains were received" — a comfortable window of up to sixty days. That rule is in article 153, § 1, item I of the Regulation. Item III of the same paragraph covers you:

"III – by the acquirer, or, where the acquirer is resident abroad, by their attorney-in-fact, on the date on which the taxable event occurs, in the case of income attributed to persons resident abroad." (Income Tax Regulation, article 153, § 1, item III — author's working translation)

The revenue service's manual states the same deadline for the relevant revenue code: "on the date on which the taxable event occurs". And, unusually, the two older instructions agree with the statute here even while disagreeing about who pays: both say on the date of the disposal.

Two practical consequences, and they run in opposite directions. For you, it means the tax has to be computed before the closing, not after it — the arithmetic, the cost basis, the documents proving the cost, all of it has to be finished while the deed is still a draft. For the buyer, it means that a closing where nothing was withheld is a closing where the buyer is already late. We have seen the discovery happen weeks afterward, when the parties have scattered across two continents and the only person with an incentive to fix it is the one who no longer holds the money.

On the revenue code itself: the MAFON 2024 entry that contains the capital-gain brackets is code 0473, "income from work and from the provision of services without an employment relationship and earnings of any nature, earned by persons resident abroad" — a title that sounds unrelated until you read the taxable event it defines, which ends with the words "and capital gain". Codes are revised periodically: confirm it against the manual for the year of your sale.

What is actually taxed: the gain, not the price

Brazil does not tax the sale. It taxes the gain, and the definition is arithmetic rather than interpretive.

"Article 26. The disposal of assets and rights located in Brazil carried out by a non-resident is subject to definitive taxation in the form of a capital gain, in accordance with the rules applicable to natural persons resident in Brazil. § 1. The capital gain is determined by the positive difference between the disposal value and the acquisition cost of the asset or right." (Normative Instruction SRF 208/2002, article 26 and § 1 — author's working translation.) The revenue service repeats that first sentence, word for word, on its own public page about the taxation of non-residents.

Two words in there carry weight. "Definitive" means the tax is final at the moment it is paid: there is no annual return in which it is later reconciled, no refund mechanism through a filing, no offsetting against other income. Whatever is settled at the closing is settled. And "positive difference" means that a loss is simply a loss — it does not generate a credit and cannot be set against a gain on another asset.

The acquisition cost is the amount you paid, in reais: "The cost of assets or rights is deemed to be the acquisition value expressed in reais" (Normative Instruction SRF 84/2001, article 5). It is not the municipal assessed value, not a valuation, not what the property is worth today, and not the figure in a foreign currency you happen to remember. And for anything acquired from 1996 onward, that figure is frozen: it is not indexed, not adjusted for inflation, not restated. Two provisions say so — article 8 of the same instruction, and article 26, § 2 of the non-resident instruction, which allows an update by an official index only for acquisitions up to 1995.

The consequence deserves to be stated bluntly, because it is the reason Brazilian capital-gain bills surprise people. If you bought in 2009 and are selling in 2026, Brazilian tax law treats your 2009 reais and your 2026 reais as the same money. Everything the currency did in between shows up as taxable gain. This is not a rule aimed at foreigners — Brazilian residents live under it too — but it hits a foreign seller harder, because a foreign seller is usually measuring the whole transaction in a currency that did something entirely different over the same seventeen years, and may have made no real gain at all in the currency they actually live in.

Everything that goes into your cost basis

Since the cost is frozen, the only lever left is making sure the cost is complete. Brazilian law is generous about what may be added to the acquisition cost of real property, and this is the part of the file most sellers assemble badly or not at all. The list is in article 17, item I of Normative Instruction SRF 84/2001, and it runs to eight lettered items:

• Construction, extension and renovation, where the plans were approved by the competent municipal authorities — and, expressly, small works too: the provision names painting, tile repairs, plumbing, floors and walls.
• Demolition of a building on the land, where demolishing it was a condition of the sale.
• Brokerage fees on the purchase of the property you are now selling, where you bore the cost.
• Public works paid for by the owner that benefited the property — curbs, gutters, paving, sewer and electricity connections.
• The transfer tax you paid when you bought. The ITBI you resented at your own purchase was not a sunk cost: it is part of your basis now.
• Betterment contributions.
• "The interest and other charges paid to acquire the property." If you financed the purchase, the interest is basis. This one is worth a great deal and is almost never in the file we are handed. We verified the wording against two independent mirrors of the instruction because the point is load-bearing.
• The laudêmio — the transfer fee due on property held under Brazil's emphyteusis-type titles — where one was paid.

The Regulation carries a shorter version of the same list, in article 137 — brokerage, construction, demolition, public works, the transfer tax the seller paid on their own purchase, and betterment contributions. It does not repeat the interest item. We flag the difference rather than paper over it: the instruction is the specific rule on assessing individuals' capital gains and it is in force, having been amended in 2005 and not repealed.

Now the condition that governs all of it, and the trap inside the condition. Every item on that list is admitted "when evidenced by suitable and appropriate documentation". Miss that, and the rule that fills the gap is severe:

"§ 3. The acquisition value of the asset or right for the purposes of this article must be evidenced by suitable and appropriate documentation. § 4. Where evidence is impossible, the acquisition cost shall be equal to zero." (Normative Instruction SRF 208/2002, article 26, §§ 3 and 4, § 4 in the wording given by Normative Instruction RFB 1,662 of September 30, 2016 — author's working translation)

A cost basis of zero means the tax is calculated on the entire sale price. Not on the gain — on the price. It is the difference between paying tax on the R$ 300,000 you actually made and paying tax on the R$ 900,000 the property sold for. And the earlier wording of that paragraph was gentler: before 2016 it allowed the cost to be established from capital registered with the Central Bank in connection with the purchase, falling back to zero only in other cases. That softer route was removed. Today the paragraph is one line and it goes straight to zero.

There is one honest complication we will not resolve for you. Article 17 of the 2001 instruction admits those cost items when documented and itemized in the annual income tax return — and a non-resident does not file one. No provision we read reconciles that condition with a seller who has no return to itemize them in, and we are not going to invent the reconciliation. What follows from it is practical rather than interpretive: keep the purchase contract, the tax payment form for the transfer tax, the invoices for the works, the loan statements showing interest, the brokerage receipts, and keep them in a form that survives being read by someone else years later. Documentary care is the cheapest thing in this entire transaction and the only part of the arithmetic still under your control.

The reliefs that do not travel with you

Brazilian residents selling property have a useful set of exemptions and reductions. A seller who has left Brazil, or who never lived there, tends to find them on a Portuguese-language page, calculate a comfortable number, and then meet this sentence:

"§ 5. In assessing the capital gain of a non-resident, the exemptions and reductions provided for residents in Brazil do not apply." (Normative Instruction SRF 208/2002, article 26, § 5 — author's working translation)

That is all of it — one sentence, in the same article that defines how the gain is computed, and carrying no amendment note in the mirror that stamps amendments. Here is what it takes away.

The last row is not a consolation prize. If you inherited or bought a Brazilian property before 1996 — a common profile among foreign heirs and long-departed Brazilians — the update of the cost to 1995 is expressly available to you, and it is a real number on an old basis.

One point for readers who arrived here through an estate: the cost you are working from was fixed upstream, in the partition. The value entered there becomes your acquisition cost, and where the deceased was not a Brazilian tax resident there is no declared value to elect — it has to be proved, or the cost is treated as zero and the tax falls on the whole sale price. That decision, and the rest of the Brazilian estate procedure for an heir living abroad, is the subject of our article on inheritance in Brazil as a foreign heir.

The rest of the table repays a careful look, because the restriction does not have the same weight in every row, and we have not seen that distinction made anywhere in English. In two rows — the 180-day reinvestment and the FR1/FR2 factors — the limitation to residents is written into the statute itself. Congress wrote "natural person resident in the country" into articles 39 and 40 of Law 11,196/2005, and the instruction merely repeats what the legislature already decided. In the other three rows, the statutes are silent about residence: article 23 of Law 9,250/1995 exempts the gain "on the disposal of the sole property the holder owns" without qualifying who the holder is, article 22 does the same for small-value assets, and article 18 of Law 7,713/1988 grants its percentage reduction by year of acquisition without mentioning residence at all. In those three, the restriction is created by the instruction and by nothing above it.

Set that against the statute at the top of this whole structure — article 18 of Law 9,249/1995, which says the non-resident's gain is assessed and taxed "in accordance with the rules applicable to residents in the country" — and you have a genuine question about whether an administrative instruction can subtract what a statute granted. We are not resolving it in a blog article, and we would be suspicious of anyone who did. What we can tell you is the operational reality and the shape of the argument: the revenue service applies § 5, a closing will be conducted on that basis, and any position to the contrary is a position taken deliberately, with its risks priced in and its consequences understood. That is a decision for a specific file with a specific amount attached, and it is one we take with the client rather than for them. This article contains no case-law citation, and we did not read any court decision for it.

The practical translation, for planning purposes: if you are a Brazilian resident holding a sole property you expect to sell for under R$ 440,000 and you are thinking about leaving, the sequence of your dates is worth more than any structure — because the exemption is attached to a status you are about to change. That sequencing is the core of our non-resident tax practice.

If your country has a treaty with Brazil

Brazilian law leaves the door open in three places. The non-resident instruction sets the rate "save for the existence of an agreement, treaty or convention entered into between Brazil and the seller's country of residence" (article 27, item I). The capital-gains instruction lists the non-resident as a taxpayer "subject to the agreements or treaties entered into with the taxpayer's country of residence" (Normative Instruction SRF 84/2001, article 4, item II). And the revenue service's own manual states, among its observations on the relevant revenue code, that "the provisions contained in international agreements prevail over the rates established in the Income Tax Regulation, in the light of article 98 of the Tax Code", citing an administrative ruling as an example.

What we will not do is tell you what any particular treaty says. We did not read a treaty for this article, and treaty articles on immovable property, on capital gains and on the elimination of double taxation interact in ways that cannot be summarized safely across thirty-odd different instruments. Two things are worth knowing before you go looking. Brazil has a treaty network of roughly three dozen conventions, and whether yours is in it is a question with a yes-or-no answer that takes a minute to establish. And Brazil and the United States have no income tax treaty — a point we set out in our article on investing in Brazil as a non-resident, and one that surprises American sellers who assume a relationship this large must have one. What exists between the two countries in this area is unilateral reciprocity of tax credit, which is a separate mechanism with its own scope.

The honest instruction, then, is procedural rather than substantive: establish whether a treaty covers you, read the specific articles of that specific treaty, and do it before the sale — because the treaty question, if there is one, changes what should be withheld at the closing, and a withholding that already happened is much harder to argue with than one that has not.

Three things this is not

A great deal of confusion in this area comes from three neighboring rules that look like this one and are not.

1. The transfer tax is not your tax. The ITBI is a municipal tax on the transfer, owed under municipal law and in practice by the buyer. It is not a capital gains tax, it is not federal, and it is not measured by your gain. Where it touches you is in the other direction, and pleasantly: the ITBI you paid when you bought is part of your cost basis today. Because it is municipal, its rate and mechanics vary from city to city, and this article states neither.

2. Withholding on rent is a different regime entirely. Rent paid to an owner living abroad is subject to withholding at source in Brazil, monthly, with its own revenue code and its own responsible party — and the responsible party there is the attorney-in-fact in Brazil, not the buyer of anything. Different taxable event, different frequency, different form. People who have been renting out a Brazilian apartment for years sometimes assume the sale will work the same way. It does not, and mapping one onto the other is how deadlines get missed.

3. Gains on Brazilian shares are not gains on Brazilian property. If you have read that non-residents pay no Brazilian income tax on capital gains earned on the exchange, that is a real rule and it is about exchange-traded securities under the special regime for foreign investors — the subject of our article on investing in Brazil. Real property sits nowhere near it. An apartment in Rio is not a security, and no part of the investor regime reaches it.

Why the sale is not invisible

Foreign sellers occasionally arrive with a quiet hope that a transaction conducted between two private parties, one of whom lives on another continent, might simply not be noticed. It is worth knowing how the information actually moves, because it moves automatically and it does not depend on anyone reporting anything voluntarily.

Brazilian notaries and property registrars are required to report property transactions to the revenue service. Article 985 of the Income Tax Regulation obliges notarial and registry officers to report real estate transactions noted, recorded, executed, registered or filed in notarial or property registry offices through a Declaração sobre Operações Imobiliárias — a declaration on real estate transactions — with one declaration per transaction, filed by the last business day of the month following the act. The deed that makes you the seller is, by the same act, the document that reports the sale.

Which is why the CPF, Brazil's individual taxpayer number, is not optional here and never was. Enrollment is mandatory for persons "resident in Brazil or abroad" who "carry out, in Brazil, real estate transactions of any kind" and, separately, who "hold, in Brazil, assets and rights subject to public registration or specific registry, including real property" (Normative Instruction RFB 2,172/2024, article 4, item II, points "a" and "d"). Owning the property already created the duty; selling it triggers it a second time.

And a duty that catches foreign owners repeatedly, which we set out in detail in our article on the non-resident bank account in Brazil: a foreigner with an address abroad, aged sixteen or over, must update their CPF registration every year through the revenue service's mobile application, with a photograph of their face and of their passport (article 23-A of the same instruction, inserted in November 2024). A CPF that is not in regular standing is the most common reason a Brazilian operation stops — and the moment it stops is the closing, with the buyer's financing clock running.

One more notification, and it is the one skipped most often. Under the non-resident instruction, an individual who has become non-resident and receives income from a Brazilian source must inform the paying source of that condition, in writing, so that withholding is applied correctly. The revenue service says the same thing on its public page about departure from Brazil. Telling your bank is not telling your buyer, your tenant or your fund manager: these are separate addressees and each one withholds on the basis of what it has been told.

That page also settles a question we are asked constantly by people who left Brazil without filing anything. For someone who departed permanently without filing the communication and the declaration of definitive departure, income from Brazilian sources is taxed as a resident's for the first twelve months from departure; from the thirteenth consecutive month of absence, it falls under the non-resident regime — expressly including articles 26 and 27, the capital gains provisions. So which regime applies to your sale may depend on a date you never formalized. Establishing that date, in both directions, is the work.

Getting the money out of Brazil

Here is where the guides stop. Of the twelve English-language pages we read, one followed the money past the tax with any normative depth. The other eleven end at the closing, which is roughly like a map that stops at the airport.

The sale settles in reais, inside Brazil. Moving those reais abroad is a foreign exchange operation, governed by a different body of law with a different regulator, and it has its own requirements, its own paperwork and its own tax. Three things have to line up.

The account. The proceeds have to land somewhere before they can leave. For someone domiciled abroad, that is an account in reais held by a non-resident — a category Brazilian law treats generously: institutions licensed to operate in the foreign exchange market may open, maintain and close them "under the same conditions under which they may open and maintain such accounts held by residents" (Resolution BCB No. 277 of December 31, 2022, article 67) — subject, as that article adds, to the other rules in the same part of the resolution. The whole subject, including the account category the internet still sells you that was abolished at the end of 2022, is our separate article on the non-resident bank account. The sequencing point is the one that matters here: the account has to exist before the closing, not after it. We have watched sale proceeds sit immobilized for weeks while an account was opened that could have been opened months earlier.

The classification, which is your responsibility and not the bank's. This surprises people:

"Article 4. For the purposes of classifying the purpose of the foreign exchange operation, which is the client's responsibility, the institution authorized to operate in the foreign exchange market shall present or make available to the client, in a free format allowing clear understanding by the client, the codes set out in: I – Annex III for indicating the purpose of a foreign exchange operation of up to US$ 50,000.00 […]; II – Annex IV for indicating the purpose of a foreign exchange operation exceeding US$ 50,000.00 […]" (Resolution BCB No. 277 of December 31, 2022, article 4, items I and II, in the wording given by Resolution BCB No. 337/2023 — author's working translation)

Two things follow. There is a threshold at US$ 50,000 that changes which set of purpose codes applies — and the proceeds of a property sale will usually be past it. (A further annex, outside that split, covers international postal services and electronic foreign exchange payments, whatever the amount.) And the classification of what this money is belongs to you. If the code is wrong, that is not the bank's error to have made.

The documents, which nobody can list for you in advance. This is the finding that most changes how people prepare, and it is one line of the same resolution:

"Article 7. The institution authorized to operate in the foreign exchange market may require or waive, according to its own assessment, information and supporting documents, taking into account the assessment of the client and the characteristics of the operation." (Resolution BCB No. 277/2022, article 7 — author's working translation)

There is no closed regulatory list of documents for remitting the proceeds of a Brazilian property sale. What the bank asks for is the bank's own risk assessment, which is why two institutions give two different answers without either being wrong, and why the answer you were given three years ago may not be the answer today. In every file we have run, the documents that make the conversation short are the same ones: the deed, proof that the tax on the gain was paid, evidence of how you acquired the property in the first place, and a coherent account of where the money came from and where it is going. Whatever the bank collects, it keeps: the same resolution requires the institution to preserve the information and supporting documents, at the Central Bank's disposal, for at least ten years (article 8).

Two boundaries on this section, both stated plainly. Currency conversions carry the IOF, Brazil's tax on financial operations, and its rates run asymmetrically — cheaper coming in than going out. We are not printing a number, because the current wording of those rates sits in a chain of 2025 amending decrees that was suspended by a legislative decree and then partially restored by a single-judge decision still subject to confirmation by the full Supreme Court. The residual rates in the regulation are set out in our article on the non-resident bank account; what is in dispute is the 2025 wording laid over them. Confirm the applicable rate on the date of your operation, with the institution executing it. A rate memorized from any article, this one included, is not a rate.

And one obligation that is not yours: the DCBE, Brazil's declaration of capital held abroad, whose filer is the Brazilian resident with assets outside Brazil. The statute divides the world by definition — "Brazilian capital abroad" is what residents hold outside the country; "foreign capital in the country" is what non-residents hold inside it — and you are on the second side of that line.

Selling without flying back

Most of our clients in this situation do not want to travel to Brazil to sign a deed, and in the ordinary case they do not have to. The instrument that makes it possible is a power of attorney granting a person in Brazil the authority to sell on your behalf — a document with its own formal requirements and its own routes for being executed abroad, which we set out in our article on hiring a Brazilian lawyer from abroad — including which of those routes is closed to a grantor who is not a Brazilian national. Three points belong here because they are specifically about the tax.

First, the power of attorney and the tax duty are not the same appointment. Your attorney-in-fact sells the property; the buyer withholds the tax. Those are two different people doing two different things, and a power of attorney that says nothing about tax does not move the withholding duty anywhere.

Second, if the buyer is the one abroad, the buyer's attorney-in-fact carries the withholding duty. Anyone acting under a Brazilian power of attorney on the purchasing side of a deal with a foreign seller should know that before signing, not after.

Third, the CPF has to be in regular standing on the day — it is required for the transaction, for the account that receives the money, and for the remittance. Where a non-resident seller has no CPF at all, the older instruction allows the payment form to be issued under the attorney-in-fact's number: a workaround for the payment, not a substitute for your own number being in order.

The sequence we run, and the order counts for more than the speed: fix the status (are you a non-resident for tax purposes, and since when — a question with a formal answer, not a felt one); put the CPF in regular standing and treat the annual update as recurring; assemble the cost basis with its documents, because that is the one number still in your hands; open the account before there is money to receive; agree on the withholding in writing with the buyer before the deed rather than after it; and establish the remittance route with the bank while the sale is still in progress.

Six mistakes we keep seeing

1. Treating the tax as the seller's errand. The statute makes the Brazilian buyer responsible for withholding and paying it, and where the buyer is abroad, the buyer's attorney-in-fact. A closing at which nothing was withheld is not a closing you got away with; it is a closing with an open liability attached to someone who has your money.

2. Budgeting on a flat 15%. Four of the pages we read state a flat rate for non-residents, and there is a real 2002 instruction behind that claim. The statute, the regulation and the revenue service's own manual apply the progressive scale. On most sales the two answers coincide; on a large gain they diverge by an amount that would have changed the decision to sell.

3. Assuming the resident's exemptions come with you. The R$ 440,000 sole-property exemption, the 180-day reinvestment relief, the small-value threshold and the reduction factors are all switched off for a non-resident by a single sentence in an instruction — and two of them are switched off by the statutes themselves. Building a sale plan on relief you will not get is the most expensive miscalculation in this area.

4. Arriving at the closing without the cost basis documented. The tax is due on the day of the sale, and where the acquisition cost cannot be evidenced, it is zero — meaning tax on the whole price. The invoices, the interest statements, the transfer tax you paid when you bought: all of that is money, and all of it has to be in hand before the deed, not found afterward.

5. Solving the tax and forgetting the border. Reais in a Brazilian account are not proceeds you have received; they are proceeds you have not yet moved. The account, the purpose classification, the bank's document requirements and the currency tax are a second project, and they take longer than the sale when they are started after it.

6. Letting the CPF lapse. It is the thread running through every step — the transaction, the registry, the account, the remittance. For a foreigner with an address abroad it now carries an annual update requirement, and it is silently the most common reason a Brazilian closing stops moving.

None of this is complicated in the sense of being hard to understand. It is complicated in the sense of being ordered: each step forecloses or opens the next, and almost every expensive outcome we are asked to fix came from doing the right things in the wrong sequence. That sequencing, from residence status through to the last remittance, is the engagement we run in our non-resident taxation practice, alongside the transaction itself in our real estate work for foreign owners. And where the sale is the tail end of a dispute — a foreign judgment ordering the transfer, or dividing the property — that judgment first has to pass through Brazil's recognition process, which has a hard limit precisely for Brazilian real estate; both are set out in our article on enforcing foreign judgments in Brazil.

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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.

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Legal note. This article is informational and does not replace individual legal advice. No property, broker, bank or financial product is recommended here, and nothing in it is investment advice: the text describes rules. The provisions supporting it — Law No. 10,833 of December 29, 2003 (articles 26, 47 and 93, item II); Law No. 9,249/1995 (article 18); Law No. 8,981/1995 (article 21, in the wording given by Law No. 13,259/2016); Law No. 9,250/1995 (articles 22, in the wording given by article 38 of Law No. 11,196/2005, and 23); Law No. 11,196/2005 (articles 38, 39 and 40); Law No. 7,713/1988 (article 18); Law No. 9,430/1996 (article 24); the Income Tax Regulation approved by Decree No. 9,580/2018 (articles 137, 149, 150, 153, 745, 781 and 985); Normative Instruction SRF No. 208/2002 (articles 3, § 2; 26 and its §§ 1 to 5; and 27); Normative Instruction RFB No. 1,662 of September 30, 2016, which gave article 26, § 4 its current wording; Normative Instruction SRF No. 84/2001 (articles 2, 4, 5, 8, 17, 29 and 30), as amended by Normative Instruction SRF No. 599/2005; Normative Instruction RFB No. 2,172/2024 (articles 4, item II, and 23-A, the latter inserted by Normative Instruction RFB No. 2,236 of November 22, 2024); Law No. 14,286/2021 (articles 5, § 4, and 8, items I and II); Resolution BCB No. 277 of December 31, 2022 (articles 4, 7, 8 and 67), article 4 in the wording given by Resolution BCB No. 337/2023; and Decree No. 6,306/2007 (article 15-B) — were checked against official sources or named specialist mirrors in August 2026, with the provisions the argument rests on named in the text itself. The revenue service's own withholding manual (MAFON 2024, revenue code 0473) was consulted in the official PDF published on the federal government's website, as was the revenue service's public page on the taxation of non-residents. 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. This is an original article, not an adaptation: the firm has no Portuguese-language piece on this subject, so it inherits no prior verification record, and every provision cited was verified for this article. Method caveats. The Brazilian federal revenue service's norms portal does not answer automated queries — its programmatic endpoint returned an authorization error and the legacy static page no longer exists — so Normative Instructions SRF 208/2002 and SRF 84/2001 were each verified against two independent named specialist mirrors and compared with one another on every load-bearing provision, one of the two carrying amendment stamps. The statutes were checked against the official federal legislation text. The Central Bank rules and the exchange-control statute were verified for the firm's companion article on non-resident bank accounts and re-read for this one. The statement about English-language search results reflects the firm's own review of the leading results on this subject in August 2026 — twelve pages read in full — and is limited to those pages; it is not a survey. No court decision was read in full and the article contains no case-law citation, and no double taxation treaty was read for this article, which is why nothing is asserted about the content of any treaty. Gray areas declared in the body and not resolved by inference: (i) whether article 26, § 5 of Normative Instruction SRF 208/2002 may deny a non-resident reliefs that the statutes creating them — articles 22 and 23 of Law 9,250/1995 and article 18 of Law 7,713/1988 — do not themselves restrict to residents, given that article 18 of Law 9,249/1995 sends the non-resident to the resident's rules; (ii) the coexistence of the withholding duty of article 26 of Law 10,833/2003 with the payment rules of the earlier instructions, no act having declared the latter repealed; (iii) how the condition in article 17 of Normative Instruction SRF 84/2001 that cost items be itemized in an annual return applies to a seller who files none; and (iv) the IOF rates, whose current wording was suspended by legislative decree and partially restored by a single-judge decision still subject to confirmation by the full Supreme Court (the existence of that decision was taken from the court's institutional news service and specialist bulletins, not from the decision itself) — the rate must be confirmed on the date of the operation. Revenue codes are revised periodically and must be confirmed against the manual for the year of the transaction; the list of low-tax jurisdictions is dynamic and is not reproduced here; the transfer tax on the purchase is municipal and neither its rate nor its statutory taxpayer is stated here. 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.