Brazil's Migratory Year: Why Leaving Doesn't Reset Your 90 Days
Quinn Moran · Published
No. Under Decree 9.199/2017, Brazil's visitor count starts at your first entry. It is suspended while you are outside Brazil and resumes when you come back. The 90-day initial stay and the 180-day maximum are both measured against your migratory year, which is the 12 months from your first entry. You only get a fresh 180-day budget when that anniversary arrives.
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Many people who visit Brazil more than once a year assume, without really thinking about it, that each trip starts a new 90 days. It doesn't. Brazil's visitor rule gives you a single budget. It opens on the day you first enter, it is used up only while you are in the country, and it refills only when a 12-month window closes. This post covers that window, the migratory year, and how days are counted against it over several trips.
Two numbers, one window
Article 20 of Decree No. 9.199/2017 sets the visitor stay at up to 90 days. The Federal Police can extend it by up to another 90, as long as total stay does not exceed 180 days in each migratory year. The Brazil visitor 90-day rule guide covers who is admitted visa-free, who needs the eVisa and how an extension is filed. This post is about the structure underneath those details:
- 90 days is the initial allowance.
- 180 days is the annual maximum, and you can only reach it with an extension.
- The migratory year is the 12-month period counted from the date of your first entry into Brazil.
Neither number applies per trip. Both are measured against the migratory year.
What suspended means
Articles 19 and 20 of the decree say the stay period runs from first entry and that the count "será suspensa sempre que o visitante deixar o território nacional", meaning it is suspended whenever the visitor leaves Brazil.
Suspended is the right word. A suspended count is frozen, not cleared. When you come back, it picks up from the number it stopped at.
People often miss two consequences of this:
- A border run buys nothing. Leaving and coming back in does not give back any of the 90 days or any of the 180. It only stops the count while you are outside the country.
- Day 90 can fall in the middle of a trip, months after your first visit. The initial allowance carries over when you leave, so day 90 is counted across every visit in the migratory year. It is not the 90th day of the trip you are on.
A three-trip ledger
Take a traveller whose first entry is 1 February. Their migratory year runs to the following 31 January. Every day inside Brazil counts, including the arrival and departure days of each visit.
| Visit | Days in Brazil | Running total | Where it stands |
|---|---|---|---|
| February to March | 40 | 40 | Inside the initial 90 |
| June | 30 | 70 | Inside the initial 90 |
| October | 30 | 100 | Passes day 90 on the 20th day of this visit |
On the October visit, day 20 is cumulative day 90 and day 21 is day 91, which is beyond the initial allowance. Staying past that point lawfully depends on an extension granted by the Federal Police. An extension can only be granted for a stay that is still current, because an expired stay cannot be extended retroactively. It makes no difference that the October trip was only 30 days long. The rule never looks at the length of a single trip.
If the traveller had flown home after 20 days in October, the ledger would show 90 of 180 days used, with the migratory year still running until 31 January.
This matches the worked example in the guide. A first entry on 1 February, a 40-day stay ending 12 March, a 30-day return in June and 20 days in October add up to exactly 90 visitor days. The February departure reset nothing. It only stopped the count.
The anniversary is the only reset
Only one event gives you a fresh budget: the end of your migratory year. Decree 9.199/2017 ties the window to your first entry, so it renews on your first-entry anniversary. Days after the anniversary count against the new year's 180.
This has two effects:
- 1 January means nothing to the rule. A calendar-year count is wrong by however many months lie between 1 January and your first entry.
- The window is personal. Two people on the same flight can have migratory years that end months apart, because each window opened on that person's own first entry.
The anniversary can also fall in the middle of a visit. Suppose your first entry was 20 November, so your migratory year runs to the following 19 November. A visit from 1 November to 30 November then crosses the anniversary. The 19 days from 1 to 19 November count against the old year, and the 11 days from 20 to 30 November count against the new one. A single trip draws on two budgets.
Where counting usually slips
To count against a migratory year you need three things: the exact first-entry date, every entry and exit since then, and arrival and departure days counted as full days. If any one of them is wrong, the count is wrong.
The first-entry date matters most, because everything else depends on it. If it is off by a month, the anniversary is off by a month, and so is your idea of when the budget refills.
Partial days come next. Under the rule, a visit from 10 June to 20 June is 11 days, not 10. Across four or five visits a year, counting nights instead of days can lose several days, and the error always makes the remaining allowance look bigger than it is.
The third problem is the per-trip habit. Someone who thinks of each trip as 30 days out of 90 will not notice that the cumulative count has passed 90 until it already has.
How extensions and overstays fit the count
The extension and overstay rules attach to the cumulative count, not to individual trips.
Extensions. An extension adds up to 90 days, applied for to the Federal Police before the current period expires. You apply through servicos.pf.gov.br and then complete an in-person step at a Federal Police unit. The fee is R$ 110.44. Extensions are only available to nationals of countries that give Brazilians reciprocal treatment. Some visit types cannot be extended at all: visits for artistic or sporting activities, and certain maritime cases, are capped at 90 days per migratory year. For those travellers the ledger above stops at 90.
Overstays. Under Article 109 of Law 13.445/2017, staying past your authorised period is an infraction fined per day of overstay. Article 108 sets the range for individuals at R$ 100 to R$ 10,000 per infraction. The Federal Police notify overstayers to regularise their status or leave within 60 days, and deportation follows if they do neither.
One overstay rule reaches across migratory years. An unpaid overstay fine can be converted into a reduction of your authorised stay on a future entry. An overstay in one year can therefore shrink the budget in a later year, which makes the ledger as much about future trips as the current one.
What a day count does not answer
The count tells you how much of the visitor allowance you have used. It doesn't tell you which document you need to enter. Since April 2025, US, Canadian and Australian citizens have needed an eVisa, while UK and EU citizens visit visa-free. Once admitted, everyone counts days under the same rules, but deciding who needs which document is not a day count.
The count also has nothing to say about staying in Brazil beyond 180 days a year. That requires a residence authorisation, such as a work, study, family, retirement or digital nomad visa, rather than more visitor entries. Whether any of those fits a particular person is not a day count either, and this post doesn't cover it.
Keeping the ledger as you go
Everything above assumes you have an accurate day-by-day record of where you were. Most people only try to build one when a question comes up, from bookings and memory, and those reconstructions tend to miss arrival and departure days, which are the ones that count.
iReside records which country and state you were in on each calendar day, from your iPhone's location, in the background. iReside's Brazil Visitor tracker counts the days of each visit against the 90-day limit; the migratory-year total across visits is not computed by the app, and the exported record is what supports working it out. The record exports as CSV or PDF, with each day labelled by where it came from: GPS, manual entry, or a planned future day. With that record, the three-trip ledger above becomes a list of dates rather than an exercise in memory. More on how this works across countries is on the visa tracking page.
Brazil is one of several visitor rules in the region with its own counting method. Travellers combining it with nearby trips can compare the Colombia 90-day tourist rule and the Mexico visitor rule. Each has its own window and its own definition of what resets it. For Brazil's thresholds, fees, visa requirements and sources in one place, the full Brazil visitor guide is the reference this post is built on.