PAT requires full company re-registration by November: those who don't migrate lose the benefit automatically
Brazil's Ministry of Labor and Employment (MTE) replaced the Worker Meal Program's (PAT) system and did not migrate the old data: beneficiary companies, suppliers and dietitians must re-register everything from scratch, or face automatic exclusion.
On the record: under MTE Ordinance No. 1,582/2026, published on September 8, Brazil's Ministry of Labor and Employment (MTE) established a new management system for the Worker Meal Program (Programa de Alimentação do Trabalhador, or PAT) and determined that all previously registered users, beneficiary companies (those that offer the benefit to employees and use the tax deduction), supplier companies, purchase-facilitator companies, and the responsible technical dietitians, must complete the full registration again on the new platform, available at novopat.trabalho.gov.br. The stated reason: data from the previous system cannot be technically migrated to the new database. Two days later, MTE Ordinance No. 1,599/2026 (September 10) extended the initial deadline from 30 to 60 days counted from the new system's launch. The rule is explicit about the consequence of inaction: anyone who fails to complete re-registration within the deadline is automatically excluded from the PAT registry, and afterward can only request a new enrollment, subject to whatever rules are then in force.
This lands directly on the radar of whoever handles compensation and benefits: PAT is the legal basis that lets a company deduct from its income tax part of what it spends on worker meals (meal vouchers, food vouchers, an in-house or outsourced cafeteria), and for the employee, the benefit keeps its favorable tax treatment when operated within the program. A company that benefits from this deduction today and simply fails to act within the deadline, whether because it doesn't know the obligation exists, because it hasn't identified who internally should handle it, or because it depends on a meal-voucher supplier that also needs to re-register, leaves the program without individual notice, silently, and loses the right to the tax deduction from that point on.
The point of attention isn't only the company's own responsibility: if the meal-voucher supplier or the responsible technical dietitian who validates the company's menu fails to complete their own re-registration, the entire chain can be compromised, even if the beneficiary company did its part correctly.
We use technology and Artificial Intelligence to map, across each company's benefits chain, this kind of ancillary obligation with a tight deadline and a not-so-obvious owner, before it turns into a lost tax deduction. If your company doesn't currently know who, internally, is responsible for this re-registration, Nexus's free Risk Checks (5 minutes) are a good place to start.
Has your company already confirmed that re-registration on the new PAT system was completed, both by the company and by whoever supplies the benefit?