Brazilian identity card
identity document of Brazil
Carteira de identidade Nacional (National Identity Card in Portuguese) is the official national identity document in Brazil. It is often informally called carteira de identidade (identity card), "RG" ([ɛʁiˈʒe]) (from Registro Geral, General Registry) or simply identidade. The card contains the name of the bearer, filiation, place of birth, date of birth, signature and thumbprint of the bearer. Other national documents can legally be used as an identity card, such as a federative unit-issued driver's license, passport or, for minors, a birth certificate. Each card has a unique RG number. As of 11 January 2023, the CPF number will be used as the RG number on new identity cards.
Brazilian identity cards can be used as travel documents to enter the Mercosur members (Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay) and associated countries (Peru, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador; except Guyana, Suriname and Panama).
Issuance
Having and carrying an RG card is not compulsory under law, but it is compulsory to carry some form of identification, so it is common for all citizens to have and carry one.
Its issuance is the responsibility of the governments of the federative units of Brazil and are valid nationwide. There is no legal restriction on having more than one identity card, provided each one is issued by a different federative units.
“Brazilian identity card” enters the record as identity document of Brazil. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Brazilian, identity and card can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3204768. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2023.
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This entry incorporates text from “Brazilian identity card” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.