The Brazilian CNPJ

The format

A CNPJ is fourteen digits in three parts, and the parts matter:

• 00000001The root — the company itself. Eight digits, shared by every one of its establishments.
• 0001The establishment. 0001 is the head office (matriz); everything above it is a branch.
• 36Two check digits, modulus 11, over everything before them.

So a CNPJ identifies an establishment, not a legal person. A company with forty branches has forty CNPJs sharing one root, one name and forty addresses — 00000000461911 and 00000000570885 are both Banco do Brasil, one branch in Paraná and one in São Paulo. That is unusual enough to catch people out: two different CNPJs can be the same company.

Brazil has no single VAT

It has several consumption taxes at once — ICMS at state level, ISS at municipal level, IPI, PIS and COFINS federally — and a reform phasing in a federal-plus-subnational VAT over the second half of this decade. There is no one "Brazilian VAT number".

What there is, on every invoice and in every contract, is the CNPJ. It is the number a counterparty is identified by, and it is what Vatlas resolves. A state tax registration (inscrição estadual) is a separate number and is not published in the federal open data.

Finding the company behind the number

The open CNPJ data

The Receita Federal publishes the entire register every month, free and without an account: every company, every establishment, every partner. It is around 6.7 GB compressed and some hundred and eighteen million rows an edition — and every monthly edition since May 2023 is still online, which makes Brazil one of only two registers on this site with a real archive to walk.

Two files, one answer

The catch is that the data is split. Empresas holds the razão social; Estabelecimentos holds the address and the situação cadastral. Neither is usable alone: a lookup needs the name from one and the address from the other, joined on the eight-digit root. Vatlas does that join at import time, so every answer is complete on the day it was recorded.

Brazil-specific pitfalls

• A CNPJ is an establishment. Same company, different branch, different number. Compare roots, not full numbers, to tell whether two CNPJs belong together.
• Leading zeros are part of it. 00000001000136 is not 1000136. Stored as a number, a CNPJ silently loses its first digits.
• Situação cadastral has five values. Only 02 (ATIVA) means trading; nula, suspensa, inapta and baixada all do not.
• The nome fantasia is not the razão social. The trading name is often empty and never the legal one.
• No state tax registration. The inscrição estadual is issued by each state and is not in the federal data.

One API, inside Europe and out

Vatlas turns a business tax number into a company record: legal name, national identifier, legal form, status and address. Same call, same shape, for a CNPJ and for a French VAT number.

curl "https://api.vatlas.dev/v1/lookup/BR00000001000136" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VATLAS_KEY"

Response:

200 OK

{
  "data": {
    "vatNumber": "BR00000001000136",
    "countryCode": "BR",
    "nationalId": "00000001000136",
    "name": "ASSOCIACAO DE AMIGOS DE BAIRRO DO CONJ PAULISTANO",
    "legalForm": "Associação Privada",
    "status": "active",
    "address": {
      "line1": "RUA REGINA GARBA, 02",
      "line2": "JD PAULISTANO",
      "postalCode": "02813030",
      "city": "SAO PAULO - SP",
      "country": "BR"
    }
  },
  "meta": {
    "source": "CNPJ",
    "sourceDate": "2026-08-01"
  }
}

meta.sourceDate is the edition the answer comes from, not the day you asked. Because every monthly edition since 2023 is still published, Brazil is one of the countries where the history is real: Vatlas can say what the register held last June as well as what it holds now.

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Business numbers in other countries

• Australia
• Japan
• Singapore
• France
• Portugal
• All countries

Last updated 8 September 2026.