how Brazil's Selic, CDI and IPCA rates work
Selic, CDI and IPCA show up together in almost every economic headline, but they measure different things: one is a monetary policy target, another is an interbank market rate, and the third is a price index. This page explains the mechanism behind each one and why the exact value never appears fixed in this text, before you check the current number in the tool.
Copom meets on scheduled dates through the year; between one meeting and the next the target stays fixed, even while the effective Selic wobbles by hundredths of a point around it.
Unlike the Selic, the CDI is not decided by a committee: it is an average of rates actually practiced between banks, computed and published by B3 every business day.
The tool fetches the value directly from the Central Bank's API on every lookup, instead of storing a fixed number, because these three rates change on different cycles through the year.
Economic rates are reference figures used to express the cost of money, returns, implied inflation, risk and other important market variables. They matter because they affect investments, credit, contracts and everyday financial decisions.
Not exactly. The Selic target is decided by Copom at periodic meetings; the effective Selic (or over) is the rate that actually occurs on one-day interbank operations, and the Central Bank intervenes in the market to keep it close to the target, but the two are set by different mechanisms.
Because the CDI reflects the very-short-term cost of money between banks, and the effective Selic is the main benchmark for that cost in the financial system; historically the two stay very close, but the CDI is calculated by B3 from real operations, not set by a monetary policy committee.
IBGE calculates the IPCA every month over a basket of goods and services representing household consumption, with weights set by the Household Budget Survey; it is the official inflation index Copom targets when deciding the Selic.
Because Selic, CDI and IPCA each move on their own cycle through the year, and a fixed number in the text would go stale within weeks; the tool fetches the current value directly from the Central Bank's time-series API on every lookup, instead of repeating a number written once.
Track SELIC, CDI, IPCA and other official Brazilian indexes.
Looked up in real time through J-Kit's secure backend, with validation, timeout and rate limiting. Nothing is stored on your device. Source: official Brazilian public data.