Minas Gerais is the state with the most municipalities in the country and a crossroads of every route: Belo Horizonte and its metropolitan region with Contagem and Betim, the Fernão Dias towards São Paulo, BR-040 towards Rio and Brasília, BR-262 and BR-381, and the mining of the Iron Quadrangle moving thousands of trucks. Infractions are applied by DETRAN-MG in the registry, by BHTrans and the municipal bodies in the cities, by the military police on state roads and by the Federal Highway Police on federal ones.

Context and authorities

Under the Brazilian Traffic Code fines have a fixed value per seriousness, add points to the licence and are paid with a discount by joining the electronic notification system; a vehicle with overdue fines gets neither the annual licensing nor the transfer. The state DETRAN concentrates those from state roads and the registry, municipalities apply those from their streets and the Federal Highway Police those from federal highways, integrated by SENATRAN.

DETRAN-MG records each infraction against the plate and the RENAVAM, notifies the owner and receives the prior defence and the appeals; Belo Horizonte, Uberlândia and Juiz de Fora have their own municipal bodies with cameras, and DER-MG enforces the state roads. The concessionaires of Fernão Dias and BR-040 and the Federal Highway Police act on federal highways; with an overdue fine the annual licensing is not issued.

What the API returns for this jurisdiction

In Minas Gerais a plate, with the RENAVAM when the source requires it, is sent to the Brazil fines API, which walks its integrated sources and returns each infraction with the body that recorded it:

  • The body that recorded the infraction and its number, unnormalised.
  • The date and reason, with the location if the source reports it.
  • The value and status current at the source.
  • Which sources answered and which did not, on every lookup.

How to check a plate in Minas Gerais

To check a plate by hand, the DETRAN-MG portal shows the infractions and the licensing status with the plate and the RENAVAM, and the Carteira Digital de Trânsito app, coordinated by SENATRAN, concentrates the notices of every body. With ten units that is enough; with a hundred, the API walks the integrated sources by plate and returns the result split by body.

What to watch if you run a fleet in Minas Gerais

A mining or ore transport fleet rotating trucks between the mines and the ports of Espírito Santo crosses dozens of municipalities with their own bodies and piles up camera infractions on BR-262 and BR-381 on units that change driver every trip; looking up each plate at month end, with the result stored per body, lets you name the driver in time.

For a metropolitan-region company licensing its whole fleet in the same month, the plate lookup before the procedure finds the BHTrans and concessionaire infractions that would block it.

How to integrate

A lookup is a POST with the identifier and, optionally, the jurisdictions to include; the initial response accepts the job and the result arrives by status lookup or webhook, because official sources answer in seconds or minutes. The asynchronous APIs guide explains how to retry without duplicating lookups, and the API page describes the full contract.

JSONIllustrative example, not a contract.
{
  "plate": "ABC1D23",
  "jurisdictions": [
    "BR-MG"
  ]
}

Limits and considerations

  • Infractions on federal highways are recorded by the Federal Highway Police and are checked in the national channels, not at the state DETRAN.
  • Values are those of the traffic code current at the time of payment, with the applicable discount or surcharge; the final amount is set by the body.
  • A source that does not answer is reported as such, never as an absence of infractions.
  • The API neither pays fines nor files defences; it delivers information to decide.

Sources and further reading