Brazil Company Register: How to Search the CNPJ and Verify Brazilian Companies (2026)

1. What is the Brazilian company register?

Brazil runs its company register on two levels. The legal registration of a business, the filing of its founding act and of every later amendment, happens at a Junta Comercial, the commercial registry of the state where the company has its seat. There is one Junta in every state and in the Federal District, each answering administratively to its state government and supervised on the technical side by a federal department, the DREI (Departamento Nacional de Registro Empresarial e Integração). That structure is set out in Law 8.934/1994. Sociedades simples, the non-commercial company forms, register at the Registro Civil das Pessoas Jurídicas instead, with cooperatives as the exception: their acts are filed at the Juntas.

The register everyone actually searches is federal. The Cadastro Nacional da Pessoa Jurídica (National Register of Legal Entities), or CNPJ, is a database managed by the Receita Federal, Brazil's federal revenue service. It holds the registration data of legal entities for the tax administrations of the federal government, the states, the Federal District, and the municipalities, and every entity and every one of its establishments gets its own CNPJ number. The rules sit in Instrução Normativa RFB 2.119/2022. Registry bodies that take part in REDESIM, the national network for simplifying business registration created by Law 11.598/2007, also count as CNPJ registration units. The Comprovante page itself carries the REDESIM logo.

In short: the CNPJ tells you a company exists, where, what it does, and who its partners are. The Junta holds the legal acts behind it. And the accounts are easiest to get for publicly held companies, through the CVM.

2. How to search the CNPJ step by step

The search is free, and in our test it needed no account. It does need the number: the Receita Federal's Comprovante de Inscrição e de Situação Cadastral page has one field, for a CNPJ, and no way to search by company name. The page and the record are in Portuguese only. The federal Consultar CNPJ service page lists the same lookup, a REDESIM consultation portal, and the Simples Nacional check among its official channels.

1. Open the Comprovante page on the Receita Federal site

   The page is titled "Emissão de Comprovante de Inscrição e de Situação Cadastral" and refers to Instrução Normativa RFB 2.119/2022, the rule book of the CNPJ. Below it sit a single CNPJ field, an hCaptcha checkbox, and two buttons: Consultar to search and Limpar to clear.

   

2. Enter the 14-character CNPJ

   Type the full number: root, order number, and check digits. If you only have a name, this page cannot help you: find the CNPJ first on an invoice, a contract, or a directory that searches by name.

3. Solve the hCaptcha and click Consultar

   Each search sits behind an hCaptcha, which is why the page is not suited to automated checks. A person has to tick the box and pass the challenge, and gets one record back.

4. Read the Comprovante

   The record shows the CNPJ and whether it is the MATRIZ or a FILIAL, the inscription and constitution dates, the legal name (nome empresarial), the trade name (nome fantasia), the size band (porte), the main and secondary CNAE activity codes, the legal nature (natureza jurídica), the full address, the email and phone fields, and the registration status (situação cadastral) with its date.

   

5. Check the partners and the branches

   The free federal CNPJ consultation service also covers the Quadro de Sócios e Administradores (QSA), the list of partners and administrators. Remember that the record describes one establishment. A company with branches has one CNPJ per branch, all sharing the same eight-character root, and each has its own address, activity codes, and status.

3. What data is public and what it costs

Brazil gives its register away in bulk and charges for it by the call. Nearly everything on the CNPJ is free to read, one record at a time or as a monthly download. The exception is the partners' CPF numbers, which the open data masks and the top tier of the paid API returns. Money comes in at two points: the official API, and the legal documents at the Juntas.

Two things are worth pulling out of that table. The CNPJ open data carries the same registrations in bulk: companies and establishments with their address, activity codes, phone, and email, plus the partners with their role and entry date. The Receita has formally classified those fields as public data, with one exception: the CPF numbers of partners and of their legal representatives are masked by hiding the first three digits and the two check digits. And the Serpro API is cheap per call but contract-bound: you sign up online, sign the contract with an e-CNPJ digital certificate, and pay by monthly volume.

What you will not find anywhere in the CNPJ: revenue, employee counts, or financial statements. The only size indicators are the share capital, which is in the open data and the API, and the porte, a self-declared size band: microempresa, empresa de pequeno porte, or demais (everything else). Petrobras carries porte DEMAIS, the band for companies that are neither a microempresa nor an empresa de pequeno porte.

4. Brazilian legal forms, briefly

The CNPJ does not record a legal form as an abbreviation. It records a numbered natureza jurídica, such as Petrobras's 203-8 Sociedade de Economia Mista, from the national table of legal natures, which the Receita also publishes with its open data. In company names the forms show up as suffixes: the Civil Code (Law 10.406/2002) requires a limitada to end its name with "limitada" or its abbreviation, and the Corporations Law (Law 6.404/1976) requires an S.A. to carry "companhia" or "sociedade anônima", in full or abbreviated.

If you are matching a supplier list against the CNPJ, expect old legal-form labels in your own records. A company can be an EIRELI in a 2020 contract and a one-member limitada today without anything having changed except the law. And because the CNPJ also covers associations, foundations, public bodies, and religious organisations, filter on the natureza jurídica rather than assuming every CNPJ is a business.

5. How to verify a Brazilian company: a practical checklist

1. Confirm the CNPJ and its status

   Run the CNPJ through the Comprovante page and check that the legal name, natureza jurídica, and address match what you were given. The status must read ATIVA. The other four statuses are SUSPENSA (suspended), INAPTA (unfit), BAIXADA (closed), and NULA (null), and the record shows the date and, where there is one, the reason. For a quick first pass, our free company lookup finds the registration and revenue data in one search.

2. Make sure you have the right establishment

   The record says MATRIZ or FILIAL. Check that the CNPJ on your invoice or contract is the establishment you are dealing with, because every branch has its own number, address, and status. Do not rely on 0001 to find the head office: a company can move its matriz to a branch with a different order number.

3. Check who the partners and administrators are

   Open the QSA and check that the person signing for the company is listed, and in what role. The open data also carries each partner's date of entry, which helps you spot a change of control shortly before a deal.

4. Pull the acts from the Junta Comercial

   For a sole entrepreneur, a commercial company, or a cooperative, the founding act and every amendment are filed at the Junta of the state where it has its seat. Anyone may consult them and obtain certificates without having to prove an interest, on payment of the fee that Junta charges. This is where share capital changes, new administrators, and dissolutions are formally recorded.

5. Check the tax regime

   The Receita lets anyone check whether a company has opted for the Simples Nacional regime, and the open data carries the Simples Nacional and MEI flags with their start and exclusion dates. A company that presents itself as large while registered as an MEI deserves a second look.

6. For an S.A., read the financial statements

   Publicly held companies (companhias abertas) file standardised financial statements with the CVM, available free as CVM open data. Petrobras appears in the CVM's register of publicly held companies as an active Category A issuer. Note that dates can differ between registers: the CNPJ gives Petrobras a constitution date of 28/09/1966, while the CVM register gives 1953-10-03.

6. Limitations of the official register

To be clear: if you have the number, the Comprovante answers the basic questions in seconds and costs nothing. The limits show up when you start from a name, need numbers, or work at scale:

• No name search. The Comprovante page takes a CNPJ and nothing else. If all you have is a company name, the official lookup cannot find it for you.
• An hCaptcha on every search. The web lookup is built for one human and one record at a time, not for scripted checks.
• No revenue, no employees, no accounts. The CNPJ holds share capital and a self-declared size band. Financial statements are public mainly for S.A.s, and in practice easy to get only for publicly held companies through the CVM.
• Self-declared data. The record itself asks for any divergence to be corrected with the Receita, and the size band is explicitly as declared by the taxpayer.
• One record per establishment. A company with hundreds of branches has hundreds of CNPJs. Matching a group means grouping on the eight-character root yourself.
• The number format is changing. From July 2026 new CNPJs can contain letters. Any system that stores a CNPJ as a number, or assumes 0001 is the head office, has to be adjusted.
• The official API needs an e-CNPJ. Serpro's Consulta CNPJ contract is signed with an e-CNPJ, the digital certificate tied to a CNPJ, and billed by monthly volume.
• Two registers, two price lists. The legal acts sit with the state Juntas, each with its own fees, separate from the free federal CNPJ.

If you check one Brazilian supplier a quarter and you have its CNPJ, none of this matters. If you start from a list of names, or onboard hundreds of companies, it is the whole problem.

7. Access CNPJ data programmatically

CompanyData maintains a normalized database of all 29,860,126 Brazilian entities, sourced from the CNPJ register of the Receita Federal and refreshed as the register changes. Records are enriched with revenue and employee data where we hold them, which the official register does not publish.

The CNPJ API lets you look up any Brazilian entity by CNPJ, name, or address and get structured JSON back in real time, with 150 free lookups to start, no hCaptcha, and no e-CNPJ contract. It is part of our global Company Data API, used by developers, banks, and insurers, so Brazilian checks work exactly like checks in any of the 190+ other countries we cover.

GET /v1/companies?country=BR&registration_id=33000167000101

{
  "name": "PETROLEO BRASILEIRO S A PETROBRAS",
  "legal_form": "Sociedade de Economia Mista",
  "registration_id": "33.000.167/0001-01",
  "city": "RIO DE JANEIRO",
  "status": "active"
}

Every field above is what the free Comprovante shows for Petrobras, with the status ATIVA written as active. Revenue and employees come back on the same record where we hold them, and are absent here for the reason this guide keeps running into: the CNPJ does not publish them.

8. Brazil vs other company registers

Brazil is unusually generous with bulk data and unusually strict with its lookup page. For context: