Brazil Removes R$500 Cap on Contactless Pix Payments From October 1

The Banco Central do Brasil will remove the R$500 per-transaction ceiling on contactless Pix payments from 1 October 2026. Instrucao Normativa BCB 746, signed on 16 June 2026, revokes article 16-A of Instrucao Normativa BCB 512 of 2024, the provision that established the cap. The revocation also covers payments initiated through the Open Finance Jornada Sem Redirecionamento.

Customers will agree the ceiling for proximity payments directly with their financial institution once the change takes effect. Contactless Pix moves onto the same limit framework that already governs transfers by Pix key and QR code. The Central Bank kept its other control mechanisms in place, including the daily transaction limits each institution sets for each user.

The R$500 cap has applied since the 2024 instruction that introduced specific limit treatment for proximity payments. Institutions have until 1 October 2026 to reflect the new framework in their apps and in their limit-change journeys.

Update (2026-10-02): Article 16-A, inserted into Instrução Normativa BCB nº 512 by Instrução Normativa BCB nº 629 with effect from 1 December 2025, required Pix transactional account providers to set a maximum value for proximity initiation for individual payers, fixed at R$500 per transaction. Article 16-C applied that ceiling to transactions initiated through the sharing of the payment initiation service without redirection under Resolução BCB nº 406. Article 2 of Instrução Normativa BCB nº 746 revokes both provisions.

Article 3 of the instruction states that it enters into force on 1 October 2026. The act also revokes item VI of paragraph 2 of article 10 of Instrução Normativa BCB nº 512, the limit-management functionality item covering requests to increase or reduce the per-transaction and per-day limits for transactions initiated by proximity.

From 1 October 2026, article 12 of Instrução Normativa BCB nº 512, as reworded by Instrução Normativa BCB nº 746, provides that a request to increase the limits listed in article 10, paragraph 2, items I to IV may be accepted at the participant's discretion.

Correction, 1 October 2026: this article states above that the R$500 cap had applied since the 2024 instruction. That is wrong. The ceiling on proximity initiation was inserted as article 16-A of Instrução Normativa BCB nº 512 by Instrução Normativa BCB nº 629, with effect from 1 December 2025. The R$500 per-transaction limit in the 2024 text (article 16, paragraph 1, revoked from 1 December 2025) applied to initiation shared without redirection under Resolução BCB nº 406.