On April 30, 2026, the regulations for the two central taxes of the consumption tax reform were published:
Decree No. 12,955/2026, which regulates the Federal Contribution on Goods and Services (Contribuição sobre Bens e Serviços — CBS), within the federal government’s jurisdiction; and
Resolution No. 6/2026 of the IBS Management Committee (Comitê Gestor do IBS — CGIBS), which regulates the State-Municipal Goods and Services Tax (Imposto sobre Bens e Serviços — IBS), under the shared jurisdiction of the States, the Federal District, and the Municipalities. Both instruments implement
Complementary Law No. 214/2025 — as amended by Complementary Law No. 227/2026 — and set out, at the infra-legal level, the practical application of the new system.
More than restating the law, the regulations address, in operational detail, the points of greatest impact for businesses: the broad non-cumulative regime and the input-crediting system; split payment — the collection of the tax at the financial settlement of the transaction; the timelines for refunding credit balances; cashback; the specific and differentiated regimes; and the treatment of inventories during the transition. These are extensive texts — 617 articles for the IBS and a comparable volume for the CBS — that call for a sector-specific reading.
The main pillars of the new regulations are reviewed below, by way of overview.
What do the IBS and the CBS apply to — and what falls outside?
As a general rule, the taxes apply to for-consideration transactions involving goods or services (Article 4), under a broad concept — any supply made for consideration —, reaching sales, leases, licensing, assignment, interest-bearing loans, and leasing (including financial leasing). The legal form adopted, the validity of the act, and the existence of profit are expressly irrelevant (Article 4, paragraph 3). In addition, Article 5 extends taxation, at fair market value, to supplies made at no charge or below market to partners, officers, employees, and relatives; to gifts and bonus goods; to transfers of assets to a partner through capital redemption or dividends in kind; and to other related-party transactions.
Conversely, Article 6 excludes the tax in situations that are particularly relevant to the corporate environment:
- services rendered by individuals under an employment relationship or as officers and board members;
- transfers of goods between establishments of the same taxpayer;
- transactions involving equity interests and corporate reorganizations — mergers, spin-offs, consolidations, and capital contributions or redemptions;
- financial income (except under the specific regime for financial services), dividends, and interest on net equity (juros sobre o capital próprio — JCP);
- donations made without consideration for the donor’s benefit.
To these are added the constitutional immunities (Articles 9 and 10): exports; public entities; religious institutions; political parties, labor unions, and non-profit educational and social-assistance institutions; books, newspapers, and periodicals; Brazilian phonograms; and gold defined by law as a financial asset. One sensitive point warrants attention: the non-incidence on corporate reorganizations, combined with the taxation of related-party transactions at fair market value, will require heightened attention in the structuring of intragroup transactions.
What changes in practice from now on?
The year 2026 is a testing phase. The taxes begin to be calculated and stated on tax documents — generally giving rise to an input credit for the purchaser where the tax is stated on a valid document —, but their collection is, as a rule, waived, provided that the ancillary obligations (obrigações acessórias) are met (Article 3 of Joint Act RFB/CGIBS No. 1/2025). With the publication of the regulations on April 30, 2026, a four-month period began to run: as of August 1, 2026, failure to comply with those obligations may trigger a penalty — a fine equal to 1% of the transaction amount. In practice, in our view, the immediate priority for businesses is the configuration of their systems and the correct issuance of tax documents with the new IBS and CBS fields, even without any payment of the tax at this stage.
What still depends on further regulation — and when?
The picture is far from settled. Several of the most significant points still depend on supplementary acts, and the calendar helps to anticipate when they should come.
The rates are not set by the regulations, which merely provide guidelines (Article 466) and refer to the reference rate (Article 17). These reference rates will be set by a resolution of the Federal Senate, based on calculations by the Federal Court of Accounts (Tribunal de Contas da União — TCU), and calibrated using the data gathered during the 2026 testing phase — hence the expectation that the rates applicable to the CBS will be set shortly before its full collection begins, in 2027.
Split payment, although designed in the regulation, will be implemented gradually: the phased schedule and the payment arrangements covered depend on a joint act of the Brazilian Federal Revenue Service (Receita Federal do Brasil — RFB) and the IBS Management Committee that has not yet been published, and its infrastructure — such as the Consumption Transactions Registry (Registro de Operações de Consumo) — requires supplementary technical rules. Certain concepts under the specific and differentiated regimes also remain to be detailed, such as the definition of “residential property.”
All of this fits within a transition schedule running from 2026 to 2033: after the 2026 testing phase, the CBS begins to be fully collected in 2027 — with the elimination of PIS and COFINS and the introduction of the Selective Tax (Imposto Seletivo) —, while the IBS gradually replaces State VAT (ICMS) and the Municipal Service Tax (ISS) between 2029 and 2032, until the definitive regime takes effect in 2033. In our view, most of the supplementary acts are likely to be issued during 2026, before the CBS is fully collected; this is therefore a “living” body of regulation that will require continuous monitoring.
In short, the IBS and CBS regulations consolidate the operational basis of the new model and make concrete, already in 2026, obligations that businesses must internalize — particularly documentary ones — while leaving to future acts the definition of sensitive points such as the rates and the split-payment schedule.
We remain available to discuss the practical impacts of these regulations on each company’s operations. 