Compras.gov.br — brazylijski portal zakupów

The portal was renamed

ComprasNet became Compras.gov.br in October 2021, as part of the consolidation of federal services under the gov.br brand. The change was not cosmetic housekeeping alone: the old address now issues an HTTP redirect to gov.br/compras, and federal legislation refers to the system by its current name. Decreto 11.462/2023, for example, defines SICAF, Gestão de Atas and SRP digital as tools "integrante do Sistema de Compras do Governo Federal - Compras.gov.br", provided by SEGES of the MGI. "ComprasNet" survives only as an informal name, in older documents, and in the branding of some third-party services.

What Compras.gov.br does today

It is the transactional layer of federal procurement. In practice that means four things for a supplier.

First, it runs the electronic sessions. Federal pregão and concorrência judged on menor preço or maior desconto are conducted on Compras.gov.br under Instrução Normativa SEGES/ME 73/2022 (in force since 1 November 2022, amended by IN SEGES/MGI 79/2024), which is the federal operating rule for electronic bidding under Lei 14.133/2021.

Second, it hosts SICAF, the unified federal supplier register. Registration is organised in levels: credenciamento, habilitação jurídica, federal tax and labour regularity, state and municipal tax regularity, technical qualification and economic-financial qualification.

Third, it carries the price-registration tooling: SRP digital, where a registro de preços procedure is conducted, and Gestão de Atas, which controls registered quantities, balances, adhesion requests and quantity transfers (Decreto 11.462/2023, arts. 5 and 24).

Fourth, it hosts the planning and contract-management modules that sit either side of the tender itself, including the annual procurement plan system (PGC), the electronic preliminary study (ETP digital), price-research tools and the sibling systems Contratos.gov.br and Contrata+Brasil.

Use of these federal tools is not confined to the Union. SEGES may cede use of SRP digital to bodies of the Union, states, the Federal District and municipalities by means of a termo de acesso (Decreto 11.462/2023, art. 6), and many municipalities run their tenders on the federal platform rather than build their own.

What it does not do: the PNCP

The single most important thing to understand about Compras.gov.br in the current regime is what it is not. Art. 174 of Lei 14.133/2021 created the Portal Nacional de Contratações Públicas (PNCP) as the official site for the centralised and obligatory disclosure of the acts the law requires. The full text of the edital and its annexes must be published there (art. 54), and publication on the PNCP is a condition for a contract to take effect at all: 20 working days from signature for a contract resulting from a licitação, 10 for direct contracting (art. 94). Annual procurement plans, standardised catalogues, notices, atas de registro de preços and contracts all belong on it (art. 174, para. 2).

Compras.gov.br is one of the federal systems integrated into the PNCP, alongside Contratos.gov.br, Contrata+Brasil, the works-monitoring system and SICAF. A supplier who monitors only Compras.gov.br sees federal bodies plus the municipalities that opted into the federal platform. States and most large municipalities transact on their own systems, which are required to feed the PNCP. The PNCP is therefore the source of record for coverage, and Compras.gov.br is where you actually bid federally.

Registering as a supplier

SICAF registration is a prerequisite for bidding on the federal platform, and documents are uploaded by the supplier rather than handed in at a counter. A foreign supplier without Brazilian registration is not simply excluded: according to the official SICAF FAQ, a foreign supplier is entered in SICAF by the pregoeiro or the bidding commission, on the basis of company name, international dialling codes, e-mail, address and country, plus the identification of the person responsible for the registration.

The law itself prohibits differential commercial, legal, labour or social-security treatment between Brazilian and foreign companies (art. 9, II), and accepts attestations issued by foreign entities when accompanied by a translation into Portuguese (art. 67, para. 4). What pushes most foreign suppliers towards a Brazilian entity is not the bidding rules but the documentary set required for contracting: Brazilian tax and labour regularity certificates.

What is coming

Lei 15.266/2025 added electronic commerce as a credenciamento route (art. 79, IV) through a Sistema de Compras Expressas (Sicx) for standardised common goods and services, and listed Sicx among the PNCP's functions. The MGI put a draft decree out to public consultation in May 2026. Until that decree is issued and the system is built, Sicx cannot be used.

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