Brazil

A visit visa, or a waiver where your nationality has one, buys up to 90 days, which the Federal Police may extend by up to 90 more. The ceiling is 180 days in a migratory year, and the regulation defines a migratory year as twelve months from your own first entry, so the clock is personal rather than a calendar. Two details are usually lost. The extension is available only to nationals of countries that give Brazilians the same treatment, so the second 90 days is not a general right. And the foreign ministry's own visa table marks many European nationalities with an asterisk meaning a maximum of 90 days in any 180 - stricter than the decree, and the number actually applied at the border. Unlike most of its neighbours, Brazil lets a visitor apply for residency without leaving.

Brazil has no rentista route. Nothing in the migration law or its regulation lets a person settle on investment income, rent or savings alone, and the ministry's own list of residence categories has no such heading. The one route that pays for itself from abroad is the digital nomad permit, and it is narrower than it sounds: it requires a contract with a foreign employer or client, not merely money arriving from overseas. The test is either US$ 1,500 a month from a foreign payer or US$ 18,000 sitting in a bank, and the permit runs one year, renewable once for the same period.

A pension of at least US$ 2,000 a month, transferred to Brazil, buys a residence of up to two years. The wording matters twice over. It is a transfer to Brazil that has to be proved, not merely an entitlement held abroad, and survivors' pensions count alongside retirement pensions, which is not true everywhere. Other regular income may be added to reach the figure. What the resolution does not do is say how the two years are renewed: it defers that to a further resolution which, eight years after the migration law, has not been issued.

Work residency in Brazil is the employer's application, not the worker's, and it is decided against a published ladder of qualifications: a master's degree, or a postgraduate course of at least 360 hours plus a year of experience, or a degree plus two years, or a technical qualification plus three, or twelve years of schooling plus four. The permit runs up to two years and is tied to the employer that obtained it - the model employment contract the resolution annexes says in terms that the worker may not work for anyone else. The law itself is broader than the practice: it waives the job-offer requirement altogether for an immigrant holding a higher-education degree, a relaxation the resolutions do not implement.

Two routes, and they behave differently. Investing R$ 500,000 of foreign money in a Brazilian company, against a three-year business plan judged on the jobs or income it will create, now carries residence for an indefinite term from the start. An innovation or research venture qualifies at a lower figure, which the resolution writes as one hundred and fifty thousand reais in words. Buying urban property worth R$ 1,000,000 is the other route: four years first, then indefinite, and with an obligation almost nobody reports - at least fourteen days in Brazil, consecutive or not, in every two-year period. The property route also sits awkwardly on a statute which says in terms that owning property in Brazil confers no right to residency.

A student residence runs one year at a time and may be renewed until the course finishes, against proof of enrolment, satisfactory progress and means of support. It is tied to a named institution, and leaving that institution is something the institution itself has to report to the Federal Police within thirty days. The useful part is that it is not a study-only permit: paid work is allowed as long as it fits around the study hours.

Brazil has no ancestry visa in the sense Italy or Spain use the phrase. What it has instead is a family-reunion ground that reaches two degrees in both directions: a parent or grandparent of a Brazilian, and a child or grandchild of a Brazilian, can be granted residence on that relationship alone. Where the Brazilian relative is a citizen the residence is granted for an indefinite term. A person born abroad to a Brazilian parent does not need this at all - the Constitution makes them Brazilian by birth once they are registered at a Brazilian consulate, or once they come to live in Brazil and opt for the nationality after reaching majority.

A spouse or partner of a Brazilian, or of someone who already holds Brazilian residence, is granted residence by family reunion, and the regulation is explicit that it applies without any discrimination - a stable union counts on the same footing as a marriage, and the sexes of the partners are not a condition. Where the Brazilian relative holds indefinite residence the permit is indefinite too. The naturalisation clock is the shortest Brazil offers: a spouse or partner of a Brazilian needs one year of residence rather than four.

Brazil is one of the six states that signed the Mercosur Residence Agreement in Brasilia in 2002, and the agreement has bound Brazil since 28 July 2009. It gives a national of a party a two-year residence on documents alone - identity, birth certificate, police certificates and a fee - with no income test at that stage, and it works from inside Brazil whatever migratory status you arrived in, waiving the fines that would otherwise apply. Proof of lawful means of subsistence is asked for only at the second stage, when the two years are converted into permanent residence, and that application has to be made in the ninety days before the temporary permit expires. The agreement's own definition of a party is broader than the trade bloc's: it says a party is a member state or an associated country of Mercosur, so full membership is not the test.

Four years of residence, civil capacity, no criminal conviction and the ability to communicate in Portuguese. The four years drop to one for anyone with a Brazilian child or a Brazilian spouse or partner, and a separate extraordinary route grants naturalisation after fifteen uninterrupted years with no language requirement at all. Portuguese is proved by documents rather than by an exam designed for the purpose: a Celpe-Bras certificate, a Brazilian degree, a pass in the bar exam, or a Brazilian school record all count, and nationals of Portuguese-speaking countries are excused from proving it. Naturalisation takes effect on publication in the official gazette, and within a year of that the new citizen has to register with the electoral court, because voting in Brazil is a duty.

The number is 184 days, not 183, and it is counted inside a twelve-month period rather than a calendar year. If you fall short of 184 days in a twelve-month period, the count does not simply reset on 1 January: a new twelve-month period starts from your next entry after the one that opened the previous count. Somebody who arrives with a permanent permit is a resident from the day they land. The instrument that says all this is a 2002 revenue instruction written in the language of the old foreigners' statute - it speaks of a permanent visa and a temporary visa, categories the 2017 migration law abolished and replaced with residence authorisations. It has been amended since 2017, but not on that point.

The Brazilian public health system is open on the basis of being a person in Brazil, not on the basis of a permit, a contribution record or a waiting period. The Constitution makes health a right of everyone and a duty of the state, the health law repeats it as universal and equal access, and the migration law removes the last doubt by guaranteeing migrants access to public health services without discrimination on grounds of nationality or migratory status. That last phrase is the operative one: it covers people whose papers are not in order. Brazil is the outlier in the region on this - Uruguay, Chile and Peru all key public cover to residence or to contributions.

Brazil's migration law gives a migrant a statutory right to open a bank account, in four words in a list of guaranteed rights. Two others here write banking into migration law as well - Guatemala as a right of residence, Mexico as a permission that does not depend on status. What no instrument does is say what you have to produce to exercise it. The current deposit-account rule revoked the old prescriptive lists and replaced them with a duty on each bank to verify and validate the identity and standing of its customers and to write its own criteria down in an internal document. Two things are therefore certain and one is not: the right exists, a tax number is effectively unavoidable because the revenue makes CPF registration compulsory for any non-resident holding a Brazilian bank account, and the document list is each bank's own.

A foreign licence is good for 180 days from the date you entered the country, counted from entry rather than from the licence's issue, and covering only licences backed by a convention or by reciprocity. After that you need a Brazilian licence. How hard that is depends on a distinction the resolution draws and never explains: a licence covered by a convention or reciprocity converts on medical and psychological examinations alone, while a licence the Brazilian government does not recognise requires a driving test as well. Which countries fall on which side is not in the resolution - it is left to a communication from the national traffic authority to the state licensing bodies. The traffic code delegates the whole question to CONTRAN, so there is nothing in the statute to fall back on.

Someone moving to Brazil to live can bring household furniture and goods, and the tools, machines and instruments of their trade, free of import tax and the associated federal contributions. There is no value ceiling on that exemption, but there is a condition that decides everything: until the indefinite-term residence authorisation is granted, the goods can only come in under temporary admission, not under the exemption. The shipment itself has to arrive within three months before your arrival or six months after it - and where the permit comes later, the six months run from the date the permit was granted rather than from the flight.