Of every 100 entrepreneurs in Brazil last year, 35 were registered with the National Register of Legal Entities (CNPJ), which is equivalent to 10.7 million people in this condition. This is the highest proportion ever recorded by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).
In 2025, the country had 103 million employed people, 30.6 million of whom were considered entrepreneurs, which includes employers and self-employed workers. Almost 20 million (65% of them) did not have a CNPJ.
The data is part of a special edition of the Continuous National Household Sample Survey (Pnad), released this Wednesday (23).
The study has been carried out since 2012, with the exception of 2020 and 2021, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which made data collection unfeasible.
Historical evolution
In 2012, 24% of entrepreneurs had a CNPJ. In the last year before the pandemic, the proportion reached 29.3%. In 2024, it was 33.6%. Registering with the CNPJ can represent advantages for the worker, such as issuing invoices, accessing credit and business banking services, hiring formal employees, in addition to social security benefits.
This type of formalization is also positive for the economy, since the worker contributes to taxes.
See the evolution of the proportion of entrepreneurs with CNPJ:
2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2022 2023 2024 2025 24% 25.7% 27% 28.3% 28.9% 28.1% 29% 29.3% 34.1% 33% 33.6% 35%
Employers and self-employment
IBGE classifies entrepreneurs as employers or self-employed workers. For the institute, a self-employed person is a person who works exploiting their own enterprise. The employer is the person who works on their own enterprise, with at least one employee.
Among employers, 81.1% have a CNPJ. Since 2019, this level has been at least 80%, a behavior that IBGE classifies as “stable at a high level”.
In the group of self-employed workers, there are 27.1%, the highest in the entire historical series. In 2012, it was 15%.
Despite reaching a record level in 2025, research analyst William Kratochwill points out that the level is considered “low” and associates it with the worker’s level of education.
“The majority of self-employment work is carried out by people with a lower level of education”, he says.
"The registration rate is strongly linked to the level of education. The more education a person has, the more prepared they are for the market", he adds.
Classification by education
For the first time in the historical series, more than half (50.8%) of self-employed workers with higher education had formal registration.
Those with complete secondary education and incomplete higher education (29.7%) were also above average (27.1%).
Self-employed individuals with complete primary and incomplete secondary education (18.6%) and those with no education and incomplete primary education (11%) had the lowest percentages.
For Kratochwill, the advancement of the CNPJ among self-employed people with greater education is driven by government programs to reduce bureaucracy and reduce costs, such as the Individual Microentrepreneur (MEI).
“It is a program that facilitates registration, makes it easier for people to have their company legalized, registered, so they can open a bank account, carry out operations, receive formal payments via Pix or bank slip”, he describes.
MEI
Individual Microentrepreneur is the way in which workers can become self-employed, paying tax in a simplified manner and having access to social security rights, such as retirement due to age, disability, sickness benefit, maternity pay and death pension for the family.
To access the MEI, the worker must meet a series of requirements, including: carrying out activities that are on the list of permitted occupations; hire, at most, one employee who receives the category minimum wage or minimum wage; not be a partner in another company; and have annual revenue of up to R$81 thousand (there are exceptions to revenue, depending on the activity).
Activities
Of the five activity groups surveyed, two had a CNPJ formalization rate above the economy average:
Commerce, repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles: 36.7%
Services: 33.5%
General industry: 22.8%
Construction: 14.8%
Agriculture, livestock, forestry production, fishing and aquaculture: 6.5%
Association to cooperatives
The IBGE survey reveals that from 2012 to 2025 there is a tendency to reduce the proportion of self-employed workers and employers associated with cooperatives. At the beginning of the series, there were 6.3% of them. In 2025, the level was 4.7%.
Unionization
The research identified stability in the level of unionized workers in the country, after a downward trend that continued until 2023.
In 2012, 16.1% of those employed had a relationship with unions. By 2023, the rate fell to 8.4%. Then, it rose in 2024 (8.9%). In 2025, it remained at 8.8%, a variation within stability, according to IBGE. There were 9.1 million people last year.
In the long-term trajectory, 2017 marks the beginning of a more pronounced decline in the share of unionized workers.
One of the reasons, according to the research analyst, is the labor reform approved that year. One of the changes was the end of mandatory union contributions.
The researcher adds the hypothesis that workers are not satisfied with the services that unions offer.
“When a service is not suitable for what a person wants, they will no longer submit to it, they will no longer want that type of service, as it does not suit them”, he says.
According to William Kratochwill, the data shows that there is low adhesion among young people to unionization, while older workers, aged 40 and over, represent a “real exodus”.
