Rule card · Brazil

Keep your TIM number active while abroad

Keep your TIM number active abroad: fifteen days to suspension, sixty days to deactivation, and a contract that leaves out the 30 days texts still arrive.

Checked against official pages on September 28, 2026. Rules move; when this one does, it goes on the changelog.

Rule at a glance

prepaid accounts only

If you do nothing: Fifteen days after TIM notifies you that the credit or its validity has run out, the service can be suspended
Cheapest way to hold it: A top-up before the suspension reaches sixty days
Roaming needed to receive codes abroad: Unverified (The contract covers the blocking ladder, not whether a code reaches the SIM abroad; TIM's roaming pages are the place to check that)
Twelve months away, roughly: TIM's price list is not in the contract; the regulation requires credits with 90 and 180 day validity to be sold at reasonable prices

Deactivation clockdays from TIM's notice that the credit or its validity has ended. Day 15 is the first day the contract allows a suspension. Day 45 and day 75 assume the suspension starts then; a later suspension moves both.

TIM's prepaid contract is a recent document, registered at a Rio registry office in August 2026, and it answers most of the questions this site asks. On one point it says less than the regulation it operates under, and that gap is the reason the card exists.

The ladder in TIM's own words

The contract counts from a notification, and the first number is the contract's item 5.2: "Após o decurso de 15 (quinze) dias da notificação ao CLIENTE sobre o término de créditos ou de seu prazo de validade, a TIM poderá" act. Fifteen days after TIM tells the customer the credit or its validity has ended.

What the suspension then blocks is stated in the first of the two alternatives that follow, and it is broader than a lost balance: the carrier may "efetuar a suspensão do provimento do serviço, com o bloqueio das chamadas e mensagens de texto originadas e recebidas e do tráfego de dados, exceto o envio de chamadas e mensagens de texto para serviços públicos e de emergência definidos na regulamentação". Outgoing calls, received calls, texts in both directions and data all stop, with emergency services excepted.

The end of the ladder is on the same item: the second alternative lets TIM, "após 60 (sessenta) dias da suspensão do serviço, efetuar a desativação definitiva do acesso móvel (linha) e a rescisão deste Contrato, com a consequente perda do código de acesso (número telefônico)". Sixty days of suspension, then the line and the number are gone.

What the contract leaves out

The regulation TIM operates under requires more than the contract describes. Where the Anatel RGC sets out what carriers must guarantee during a suspension, mobile operators have to provide "o recebimento de chamadas e de mensagens de texto pelo prazo de 30 (trinta) dias do início da suspensão".

TIM's contract does not carry that sentence. Its suspension clause blocks received calls and texts from the start and names no thirty-day period, which means a reader who wants the number kept alive for arriving texts is relying on the regulation rather than on the document the carrier sends. The contract does acknowledge the hierarchy elsewhere: item 5.3 provides that if Anatel changes the periods for credit validity, blocking or rescission, they are changed to follow whatever Anatel determines.

While the line is blocked

One door stays open, and the contract says which one: "Enquanto durar o bloqueio previsto acima, será permitido ao CLIENTE originar chamada para serviço automático de atendimento ao CLIENTE da TIM para ativação de novos créditos." A blocked TIM line can still call the automated service to buy credit, which is the mechanism for coming back from the edge without a shop.

Two endings are worth keeping apart. A blocked line can return with a top-up; a rescinded one cannot, and the cost of that is stated in item 8.3 of the same contract: "A rescisão deste Contrato, independentemente do motivo, implicará na perda dos créditos porventura ainda existentes." Balance and number go together.

Where this sits against the other countries

Brazil's ladder is long by the standards of the rest of this site, and the middle rung is the unusual one: thirty days in which texts still arrive by regulation. That is a shorter receive window than Smart in the Philippines allows before it disconnects at all, and longer than the ten days VinaPhone's policy gives before its two-way lock. Both of those windows come from the carrier; Brazil's comes from the regulator, which is why it applies whichever of the three networks the SIM is on.

Before you fly

Note the date the credit expires, because the fifteen days run from the notice about it rather than from the expiry itself.
Top up before the sixtieth day of suspension. While the contract still exists, the regulation sets the validity of unused credit, including credit that has already expired, to the longer of the two periods.
If the number is holding a bank account, the regulation's window for arriving texts is the first thirty days of suspension. TIM's contract does not promise that window.
Buying 180 days of validity up front removes the arithmetic entirely, and the regulation requires that option to be sold.