How to receive USD in Brazil: the IOF myth, the Wise contradiction, and what it actually costs
Two things decide what this costs you, and most guides get both wrong. The first is IOF. Every article about Brazil quotes 3.5%, and that rate is for money going out, or spent on a card abroad. Money coming in for a service you exported is zero rated, and has been since 2010: Decreto 6.306 of 2007, article 15-B, first item, on foreign exchange operations for the entry into the country of revenue from the export of goods and services. Decreto 7.412 of 2010 first set that zero rate, in the same words, as article 15-A, second item, and Decreto 8.325 of 2014 moved it to where it sits now, so the item number changed and the rate did not. For services there is a limit the guides skip: paragraph 4 of the same article ties the zero rate to exports of services classified in sections I to V of the NBS, the Brazilian services nomenclature, and we could not open a reliable list of what each section covers. The 2025 decrees that Congress suspended and the government took to the Supreme Court did reach money coming in, not only credit and outbound rates, because Decreto 12.499 of 2025 rewrote the article and added a 0.38% catch-all for inbound entries no other item covers. What they left alone was the export zero rate. Which wording of the article is in force today is genuinely contested and we are not going to pick a side: Congress suspended the 2025 text, a Supreme Court decision in July 2025 restored most of it, and the consolidated text on Planalto still carries several competing versions of the article side by side. The two numbers that matter here come out the same under either version, zero on an export of services receipt and 0.38% on a generic entry from abroad. Here is the catch, and we found it by pulling a live quote rather than reading marketing: Wise charges 0.38% IOF on an ordinary dollars to reais transfer, while Higlobe advertises 0.2% as its total cost with no IOF, and the Husky pricing page says the rate is zero on receipts booked as Brazilian service exports. So whether you pay nothing or 0.38% turns on how the institution classifies and books your operation, and providers differ, which means the app you choose does move the number. Ask yours how it books you, before you sign up. The second thing is Wise, whose own help centre reads as contradicting itself about whether you can hold dollars in Brazil. You can. The explanation is below. And one trap to know before you read any further: if you have Wise Brazilian real account details, do not send them to a US client. They only accept domestic Brazilian payments and will reject an international transfer. The details your client needs are the dollar ones.
By George I. · Last updated:
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Provider comparison: receiving $1,000 USD in Brazil
Using live mid-market rate as of 2026-10-01 · open.er-api.com
| Provider | Net received (BRL) | Effective fee | FX margin | Speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HiglobeBest value | 5,189.99 | 0.00% | +0.2% | ~1 day |
| Wise | 5,174.39 | 0.50% | Mid-market | ~1 day |
| Payoneer | 5,014.53 | 1.00% | +2.6%(est.) | ~2 days |
| Bank Wire | 4,842.74 | 3.50% | +3.5%(est.) | ~3 days |
| PayPal | 4,696.60 | 6.41% | +3.5% | ~1 day |
Higlobe: the cheapest published number, and not our affiliate
It tops our table and it is not our affiliate. We would rather you heard that from us than worked it out. Higlobe gives you your own US receiving account, an account number and a routing number you hand to a client who then pays you like any other American supplier. The payout reaches Brazil over Pix. The pricing is the cleanest thing on this page: a flat 0.2% spread on reais, no transfer fee, no monthly fee, volume described as unlimited, and a promise that the amount shown before you confirm is the amount that lands. Its Brazilian site puts the same thing as a total cost of 0.2% with no IOF, which is what you would expect for a receipt booked as an export of services. That is a published spread rather than a ceiling, which is why it can carry our badge when a provider quoting an up-to number cannot. What we could not confirm, and you should check before moving real money: whether it onboards you on a CPF or wants a CNPJ, what onboarding asks for, and which institution closes the exchange for you. None of that is on the pages we could open.
Wise: yes, you can hold dollars in Brazil
Wise is the affiliate programme this site earns from, so read the table rather than us: it comes second here, behind a provider we are not paid to recommend. Now the confusion, because it costs people real decisions. One Wise help page says a Brazilian resident can hold over 40 currencies. Another lists Brazil under additional restrictions and says you can only hold BRL if you reside in Brazil, which plenty of readers take to mean reais and nothing else. Neither page is dated. The page written for Brazil settles it and explains why: if you hold reais, that feature is provided by Wise Brasil Instituicao de Pagamento, the Brazilian licensed institution, and money in any other currency is held by Wise Payments Limited in the United Kingdom. So the restriction describes which entity provides what, not a cap on what you personally may hold. Wise's guide to opening an account for a Brazilian company points the same way, offering over 40 currencies and account details to receive in them, and Brazil is absent from Wise's list of places where dollar account details are unavailable. Note the sting in that guide though: for a Brazilian company, receiving BRL is currently unavailable, so an account registered to your CNPJ is a dollar account in practice. Costs, read from Wise's own quote endpoint on 24 September 2026 rather than from a marketing page: receiving dollars by ACH is free, converting dollars to reais cost 0.526% on $1,000 and 0.494% on $5,000, and the rate used was the mid rate, so there is no hidden spread on top. A domestic dollar wire, as opposed to ACH, costs $6.11. On the one-off charge for turning on account details, the guide for Brazilian companies mentions 250 reais payable by Pix, which is the only figure Wise puts in front of you, so confirm it in the app before you count on it.
How much does Payoneer charge to receive USD in Brazil?
The familiar option, and the one we are least able to price honestly. Payoneer publishes 1% to receive into a receiving account in a currency that is not your local currency, with a minimum of $1. Your local currency as a Brazilian is the real, so on a literal reading a dollar receipt is exactly that case and costs 1%, but no Payoneer page we could open says so about Brazil specifically. The withdrawal is worse. Payoneer's fee schedule publishes a range for a withdrawal to a bank account, 1.2% to 4%, rather than a rate, so nobody can tell you in advance where in that range you land. We have modelled 1% plus 2%, near the bottom of the published range, and flagged the row as an estimate, which also bars it from our badge. Read the range as the real answer and our 2% as a working figure. There is a $29.95 annual fee if the account receives under $6,000 equivalent in any twelve consecutive months. If your work already arrives through a platform that pays into Payoneer, the integration counts for something. If you are invoicing direct clients, the two options above cost less.
Husky: a wire route whose own pages disagree on price
A Brazilian company built for exactly this reader, and we have left it out of the priced table for two reasons. The first is that it is a wire route, not an ACH one: you get an IBAN and a SWIFT code rather than a US routing number, so your client sends an international transfer and somebody pays wire fees along the way. That is a different product from what Higlobe and Wise give you, and on small invoices the difference matters more than the headline percentage. The second is that its own two pages disagree about the price. The page about receiving money from abroad says 1.2%, reducible to 1% with a coupon, plus 0.38% IOF. The pricing page says at most 1% above $1,000, a flat $10 below that, and no IOF at all on service receipts. Both were live on the same day. We are not going to pick the flattering one, and the IOF disagreement is the same classification question this page opens with. Money reportedly arrives in one or two business days, up to five, paid out to a Brazilian account whose holder matches your CPF or CNPJ.
How much does Remessa Online charge to receive USD in Brazil?
Established, widely used, and impossible for us to rank. Its own page on receiving money from abroad says individuals and companies can both receive, that it pays into your registered bank account within two business days after the exchange closes, and that up to R$50,000 a day or R$100,000 a year needs no extra documents. What it does not publish anywhere we could find is its own fee percentage, its spread, or any IOF rate. It sends you to a simulator instead. A band of roughly 1% to 1.4% circulates in third-party write-ups and we are not repeating it as a number. Run the simulator for your actual invoice and compare the reais that land against the table above. For the inbound versus outbound split this page opens with, the page that states it outright is Husky's: IOF varies with the operation, and for money entering Brazil booked as receipts from Brazilian service exports the rate is zero.
The wire, and the one number Brazil makes everyone publish
Flat fees make a wire painful on small invoices and tolerable on large ones, and in Brazil the interesting part is not the fee. It is that the Banco Central makes the institution tell you the real number before you commit. The VET, or valor efetivo total, bundles the exchange rate, the taxes on the operation and any fees into a single figure in reais per unit of foreign currency. Under Resolucao BCB 277 of 2022, article 18, sole paragraph, the institution has to disclose the VET to you before carrying out a spot operation of up to $100,000 or the equivalent, which covers almost every freelance invoice but not a large one. The Banco Central also publishes a public ranking of the average VET each institution charged, which you can look up yourself. Read it for what it is: the figures are monthly averages for months already past, and the Banco Central says on that page that institutions are not obliged to offer those values now. It is a good way to spot which institutions are habitually expensive, not a live quote. Our own figures for this row are carried over from other wire corridors, because neither Itau nor Banco do Brasil would serve us their tariff schedule, so treat the number in the table as indicative and the VET you are actually quoted as the real answer.
How much does PayPal charge to receive USD in Brazil?
The most expensive thing on this page by a wide margin, and the default a lot of freelancers fall into. Brazilian commercial pricing stacks: 4.79% on the payment, a further 1.61% because the payer is international, a fixed 0.60 reais, and then 3.50% above the base exchange rate when the money arrives in a currency other than reais. Withdrawing to a linked Brazilian bank by standard transfer is free, which is the only cheap part. Compare the bottom line against Higlobe in the table above: on a $5,000 invoice the gap is roughly 2,500 reais. Use PayPal when a client refuses everything else, and move your recurring clients somewhere sane.
Revolut Brazil: we could not verify it
We have nothing usable on Revolut in Brazil, so we are going to leave it at that. Every revolut.com and help.revolut.com address we tried refused our requests. Search results show a Brazilian help centre, a Brazilian site and a mid-2025 promotion for new Brazilian accounts, which together suggest Brazilian residents can open personal accounts, but we did not open any of it. Treat Revolut as unknown on this corridor rather than unavailable, and check it yourself if you are curious.
Nubank does not receive international payments
Nubank cannot receive an international payment for you, as far as its own documents go. Its international transfer contract defines the product as a transfer from a Nubank account to a beneficiary abroad. Outbound only. Receiving is not addressed anywhere in that contract. The Conta Global product attached to Ultravioleta is described as converting reais you already hold rather than accepting money from abroad. If you are a Nubank customer waiting for a client payment to arrive there, it will not.
How we calculate these figures
The net received figure deducts the provider's published flat fee and percentage fee from the send amount, then converts at the live mid-market rate from open.er-api.com minus the provider's FX markup in basis points. Rates on this page refresh hourly (ISR). Fee data is sourced from each provider's public pricing page and verified periodically. Not every provider publishes an FX spread. Where one does not, we estimate it, mark the row “est.” in the FX margin column, and exclude it from the best-value badge, so the option we highlight is always one whose spread we can source.
Fee data for this corridor last verified 2026-06-02 or later; each provider card shows its own date. · Open-source fee data on GitHub
Frequently asked questions
Do I pay IOF when a foreign client pays me?
Probably not, and the 3.5% you have read about is the wrong number. Decreto 6.306 of 2007, article 15-B, first item, sets the rate at zero for foreign exchange operations relating to the entry into Brazil of revenue from the export of goods and services. Paragraph 4 of the same article adds a limit for services: the zero rate covers exports of services classified in sections I to V of the NBS, the Brazilian services nomenclature. We could not open a reliable list of what each section covers, so which section your work sits in is a question for your accountant. The rate itself has been in place since Decreto 7.412 of 2010, which set it out as article 15-A, second item, in the same words, before Decreto 8.325 of 2014 moved it to article 15-B. The 2025 decrees did reach money coming in, not only credit and outbound operations: Decreto 12.499 of 2025 rewrote the article and added a 0.38% catch-all for inbound entries that no other item covers. It did not touch the export zero rate. Which wording is in force now is contested, because Congress suspended the 2025 text, a Supreme Court decision in July 2025 restored most of it, and Planalto still publishes several competing versions of the article. The answer here is the same either way: zero on an export of services receipt, 0.38% on a generic entry. Now the honest complication. When we pulled a live quote from Wise for dollars into reais on 24 September 2026, it added a line labelled IOF at 0.377%. That is the residual inbound rate for an operation that is not booked as export revenue, and providers book it differently: Higlobe says its 0.2% is the total cost with no IOF, and the Husky pricing page says the rate is zero on receipts booked as Brazilian service exports. So the question that decides your bill is how the institution classifies the operation it closes for you, and that does depend on who you pick. Ask them directly, and ask before you sign up rather than after.
Can a Brazilian resident hold dollars with Wise, or only reais?
You can hold dollars. The page Wise writes for people living in Brazil says that with a personal Wise account you can add and hold over 40 currencies including reais, and that the same applies to a Wise Business account registered in Brazil. That page also explains the split that causes all the confusion: holding reais is provided by Wise Brasil Instituicao de Pagamento, the Brazilian licensed institution, while money in any other currency is held by Wise Payments Limited in the United Kingdom. The line that trips people up is on the page about where you need to live to hold money, which lists under additional restrictions that you can only hold BRL if you reside in Brazil. Read one way that means a resident may hold reais and nothing else, which is the opposite of what the Brazil page says. Read the other way it means only residents of Brazil may hold reais, which agrees with it. We take the second reading, and Wise dates neither page. Its guide to opening an account for a Brazilian company points the same way, offering over 40 currencies and account details to receive in them, with the catch that receiving BRL is currently unavailable for Brazilian companies, and Brazil does not appear on Wise's list of countries where dollar account details are unavailable. If it matters to your plans, open the app and confirm rather than trusting either help page.
Which account details do I give my client?
The dollar ones, and this trips people up. Your Wise Brazilian real account details cannot receive anything from outside Brazil. Wise states plainly that you cannot receive other currencies or international transfers to them. They are for domestic Brazilian payments. If you hand those to a US client the payment will not arrive. Give them your dollar details, which include a routing number that works for both ACH and wires. Higlobe works the same way, a US account number and routing number in your name. Husky is the exception on this page: it gives you an IBAN and a SWIFT code instead, so your client sends an international wire rather than a domestic payment.
Can I keep the dollars, or does Brazil make me convert?
In practice you convert, and a domestic dollar account is not on the menu. Resolucao BCB 277 of 2022, article 70, lists who may own a foreign currency deposit account in Brazil, and it is a closed list: travel agencies and tourist service providers, embassies and recognised international organisations, postal service companies, issuers of cards for international use, foreigners temporarily in Brazil and non-resident Brazilians, government bodies, companies running energy sector projects, insurers and reinsurers and reinsurance brokers, non-resident carriers, institutions licensed to operate in the exchange market, and holders of oil and gas rights. A freelancer invoicing a US client is not on it, and article 69 restricts these accounts to banking institutions licensed in the exchange market in the first place. Receiving the dollars is not the problem, incidentally: article 46 of the same resolution says export revenue may be received in reais or in foreign currency. Where you may keep them is the problem. What you can do is hold the dollars offshore first, in a Wise, Payoneer or Higlobe balance, and convert when the rate suits you instead of on the day your client pays. That is not the same as a domestic dollar account and we are not going to pretend it is. If a domestic dollar account is the thing you actually want, ask a bank, and expect no unless you fall into one of the categories above.
What do I keep as proof for the tax authority?
Whatever receipt or statement your provider issues for the exchange operation, kept with the invoice. The thing to know is that there is no standard document you are entitled to demand. Resolucao BCB 277 of 2022, article 2, says the form of entering into a foreign exchange operation is free, and asks only that the institution be able to prove both sides agreed the terms. Article 8 makes the institution keep the proof of your consent, the operation information and the supporting documents at the Banco Central's disposal for at least ten years. So the paperwork exists on the institution's side, and what reaches your hands is whatever it chooses to issue, which in practice is usually a contrato de cambio or a downloadable operation receipt. As far as we can tell Brazil has no direct equivalent of the inward remittance certificate some countries issue, and we would rather flag that as our reading than state it as a fact. Download whatever your provider does give you every time, keep it with the invoice, and if a provider will not produce anything at all, ask why before you commit rather than after.
Can I do this as a MEI?
You can invoice a foreign client as a MEI, and Wise will open a business account for one. The ceiling is the real constraint: R$81,000 a year, prorated by month if you registered part way through the year, and dollar invoices count towards it converted at the central bank rate. Two steady American clients will take you past that, and then you are looking at an ME under Simples Nacional instead. There is a bill proposing to raise the MEI ceiling from 2027, but it is not law and we would not plan around it. Which Simples Nacional annex applies to exported technology and professional services is something we could not verify, and it changes what you pay, so that one is genuinely for an accountant.
Do I owe ISS on work for a foreign client?
Maybe, and this is the item that catches people. The federal complementary law on ISS, Lei Complementar 116 of 2003, says in article 2, first item, that the tax does not fall on exports of services abroad. The paragraph immediately after takes back a good part of that: it excludes services carried out in Brazil whose result shows up here, even where the payer is resident abroad. So the statute is reasonably clear and the fight is over one word, result, which municipalities and courts read inconsistently. Two freelancers doing identical work in different cities can get different answers. Treat the exemption as a question rather than a given, and ask an accountant in your own municipality before you assume it applies to you.
Can my client just send me a Pix?
No. Pix moves reais inside Brazil and cannot carry an international payment. What actually happens is that the provider receives your dollars abroad, closes the currency exchange, and then pays you reais domestically, often over Pix. Higlobe and Wise both do that, and the Pix leg is the part that takes seconds. The dollars arriving is the slow part: Wise puts a US ACH payment at 0 to 3 working days, so plan on a few days rather than the same afternoon.
What is the cheapest way to receive dollars in Brazil?
On published numbers, Higlobe, and it is not close. A flat 0.2% spread with no transfer fee beats the roughly 0.5% Wise charges to convert, and both are far below what PayPal costs. We want to be straightforward about two things though. Higlobe is not our affiliate and Wise is, so the ranking runs against our commercial interest rather than with it. And Higlobe is the option we know least about: we could not confirm whether it onboards you on a CPF or wants a CNPJ, or what onboarding asks for, while Wise publishes all of that. On IOF it is clearer, because Higlobe states on its Brazilian site that 0.2% is the total cost and that there is no IOF, which is what you would expect for a receipt booked as an export of services. Our practical suggestion is to open both, run a real quote for your actual invoice size on the same afternoon, and compare the reais that land rather than the percentages quoted. You can also look up the Banco Central VET ranking, which compares institutions on an all-in effective rate including the taxes and fees on the operation, bearing in mind that it reports monthly averages for months already past and that institutions are not obliged to repeat those values today.
Written by George I. (20+ years in international payments). Last updated: .
Fees are estimates from publicly available pricing. Verify with your provider before transferring. Nothing on this site is financial or tax advice. How we make money.