Interstate Buses in Brazil

What the data shows

Almost 35 million passengers a year. From October 2025 to September 2026, interstate buses carried 34.8 million passengers, 12% fewer than in the previous 12 months. The peak of the series was 2024, with 42.8 million. The pandemic cut traffic in April 2020 to less than a fifth of normal. By 2021 the total was already above 2019, but part of that rise comes from Monitriip itself, which records more companies every year.

Rio–São Paulo is by far the busiest route. It had 2.2 million passengers in 12 months in both directions, three times the runner-up, São Paulo–Curitiba (724 thousand). Belo Horizonte–São Paulo, Goiânia–Brasília and João Pessoa–Recife round out the top five. Outside the Southeast, Manaus–Boa Vista stands out with 277 thousand passengers: it is the only road link between the two state capitals.

How long the trip takes. A typical trip between Rio and São Paulo takes 7 hours from boarding to arrival, including stops and traffic. São Paulo–Curitiba takes about 7h20, Belo Horizonte–São Paulo 9h30 and São Paulo–Foz do Iguaçu 18 hours. The longest ones exceed two and a half days, such as Fortaleza–São Paulo and Natal–São Paulo, at around 60 hours.

December, January and July. The heat map shows the holiday and year-end peaks every year. Day to day, Friday has the most trips and Saturday the fewest. The busiest departure hours are between 6 and 9 p.m., when the overnight long-distance trips leave.

Pricier tickets, more promotions. The average full fare rose from about R$ 108 in 2019 to R$ 177 in the last 12 months, in nominal reais. At the same time the share of promotional tickets grew, and today only half of passengers pay the full fare. About 9% travel for free, mostly seniors, people with disabilities and low-income young people.

Big companies, fragmented market. According to the timetable approved by ANTT, Auto Viação Catarinense, Viação Cometa and Viação Águia Branca lead, each with more than 1,700 departures a week. Even so, the 12 largest account for less than half of the country's 32 thousand weekly departures. Gontijo has the widest reach: 394 cities in 18 states.

Methodology

• Source. Monitriip, the system through which interstate bus companies report to ANTT (Brazil's land transport regulator) the tickets sold and the start and end of every trip, plus the registry of companies, routes and timetables (SIGMA). All from ANTT's Open Data Portal, under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
• Periods. Tickets from February 2019 to September 2026, counted by month of travel. Completed trips from January 2019 to November 2024, the last month ANTT published. Registry and timetables from October 2026.
• Routes. A route is a pair of cities, adding both directions. Only links between different states are included. Duration comes from the bus lines that connect exactly those two cities: we show the median and the range between the fastest 10% and the slowest 10%, discarding records with no end time, under 15 minutes or over 72 hours.
• Prices. Average value of full-fare tickets, not adjusted for inflation. International routes report fares in foreign currency and are left out of the averages.
• Limits. Tickets do not identify the company, so passengers per company are estimated: on each link, the total is split among companies by their share of weekly departures in the timetable. Monitriip depends on what companies report, and totals may differ from ANTT's Statistical Yearbook, which reports 36.7 million passengers in 2025 (Monitriip adds up to 39.2 million). Intercity buses within a single state are regulated by each state and are not included.