The Federal Revenue Office, through a joint technical note formulated by the General Coordination of Tax Registrations and Benefits Management (COCAD) and the Undersecretariat of Collection, Registrations and Service (Suara), sent important changes to the National Corporate Taxpayer Registry (CNPJ), to be fully implemented starting January 2026. At that time, the current numerical model will be replaced by an alphanumeric model (with letters and numbers), keeping the same basic structure and number of characters.

The change is similar to what happened with vehicle license plates, in which a number was replaced by a letter, keeping the general format unchanged.

The alphanumeric CNPJ is an alternative, to meet the growing demand for new registrations. The reasons for this increase range from the economic growth of recent decades, to the publication of legal regulations requiring the CNPJ as a means of registration, and to the explosion in the formalization of individual micro-entrepreneurs, from 2008 onwards.

The registry, which has a finite capacity for combinations, is approaching exhaustion and, to cope with the current situation, change is needed with sufficient longevity to avoid requiring further changes in the short or medium term. With this measure, the current 99.9 million possible combinations increases to almost one trillion.

The CNPJ is the most widely used data in public and private systems for registering legal entities. The financial and judicial systems, for example, on whose proper functioning the economy and institutional relations directly depend, in general, use this registry as a central point of their bureaucratic frameworks.

Thus, it was necessary to find an alternative that would impact the functioning and interoperability of these systems as little as possible. Swapping numbers for letters enables exclusively numeric records to “coexist” with alphanumeric ones, as the same number of digits (14) is maintained. Adopting a new, exclusively numeric code with more digits, would make this much more difficult.

No! Current numeric CNPJs will remain valid and fully operational, with no provision or need for them to be converted to alphanumeric format. Only new registrations will follow the new standard, starting in January 2026.

The PLBrasil Group has qualified professionals and teams trained to analyze the needs and potential situations that may impact the opening of companies in Brazil. Through its Digital Platform, it offers its clients a HUB where all corporate documents and history are concentrated and permanently available, at no cost, totally adapted to the changes.