E-scooters in Recife: JET and Whoosh, how they charge, where to ride and where to park

Which e-scooter apps work in Recife?

Two operators rent out stand-up e-scooters in Recife:

• JET, which you rent in Brazil in the Go Jet app.
• Whoosh, which you rent in its own app.

The Prefeitura (the city government) launched the service on Sunday 22 March 2026 as an experiment it would follow for 12 months, the Diario de Pernambuco and Folha de Pernambuco reported. Both firms were chosen through EITA! Labs, the Prefeitura’s innovation programme, and accredited to run it at their own cost, with the city only setting the rules. At the launch there were about 90 parking points in 19 bairros (districts): Bairro do Recife, Boa Viagem, Pina, Santo Antônio, São José, Boa Vista, Santo Amaro, Graças, Aflitos, Espinheiro, Casa Forte, Santana, Poço da Panela, Parnamirim, Jaqueira, Torre, Madalena, Derby and Paissandu. In May 2026 the Prefeitura told a court the scheme could grow to more than 400 points and about 4,000 scooters, the Diario reported.

Those rules are the pilot’s, not a city law. In its Technical Note 002/2026, signed on 30 April 2026, Pernambuco’s state traffic council, CETRAN-PE, found no complete municipal regulation of shared scooters around Recife and recommended that the state’s towns write one. A councillor asked a court to suspend the pilot; on 13 May 2026 the judge refused, and the case goes on.

New to shared e-scooters? See how to rent an e-scooter.

How much does electric scooter rental in Recife cost?

Each app shows the price before you start, and neither operator publishes a Recife rate. JET says its rates vary by city, day of the week and demand, and it charges paused time like riding time. A Whoosh Pass (7 days, 30 days or a year) removes Whoosh’s unlock fee but not the per-minute price, which also moves with demand. Whoosh may hold up to R$25 on your card when you start.

Go Jet’s terms (revised August 2026) let JET charge you for damage, loss, removal, seizure and fines, but set no amounts.

Where can you ride an e-scooter in Recife?

The rules below are those CTTU and the Prefeitura gave for the pilot, as the Diario de Pernambuco reported them on 6 April 2026, under Brazil’s national rule, CONTRAN Resolution 996 of 2023. CONTRAN puts e-scooter riders under the same traffic rules as cyclists.

Both operators cap their scooters at 20 km/h, and in pedestrian areas they slow to 6 km/h by themselves, the Diario reported in May 2026. Outside the area each operator allows, the scooter slows and may stop the trip. The area can change: in April 2026 JET said it may limit its area for a while, after riders found its scooters slowing to a halt in the Bode community in Pina.

Avenida Boa Viagem, the seafront road, has a 60 km/h limit, to fall to 50 km/h when the works on the Orla (the seafront) end, CTTU told the Diario in July 2026. Either way it is above 40 km/h, so keep to the seafront cycle lane.

Get off and push across pedestrian crossings. JET’s rules, as the Prefeitura listed them, and Whoosh’s FAQ both require it. Riding where it isn’t allowed is a medium offence under the Brazilian Traffic Code (Código de Trânsito Brasileiro), fined R$130.16; riding on a pavement where it isn’t authorised is a very serious one, with the fine tripled: R$880.41.

Where to park a JET or Whoosh scooter

You end a ride only at an authorised point your app shows, and you take a photo of the scooter standing there. In May 2026 the city had 92 points, each with room for up to six scooters from each operator.

• Whoosh: end the ride at a “P” on its map. Anywhere else costs R$40, and R$80 from the second time.
• JET: end the ride at one of the points in the Go Jet app and photograph it to finish.

Never leave a scooter where it blocks traffic. You can report a badly parked one in the operator’s app or to the Prefeitura’s ombudsman through Conecta Recife.

Age, helmets and the other rules

The operators enforce the rules too: in the first month they blocked more than 100 users, they told the Diario. A state bill, PL 4009/2026, would set rules for all of Pernambuco, and an amendment would make helmets compulsory; on 26 October 2026 the Legislative Assembly’s (Alepe’s) record showed no vote on it, so it is not law.

Where to find JET and Whoosh scooters in Recife

At 17:40 local time on Sunday 25 October 2026 the map of Recife showed about 900 standing scooters: 450 JET and 450 Whoosh. That is a snapshot, not the size of either fleet, and scooters on a ride don’t appear.

On the municipal boundaries of IBGE, Brazil’s statistics institute, about 855 stood inside Recife, every Whoosh scooter among them. The other 40 or so were JET scooters, 39 of them bunched at one spot on the southern boundary that IBGE’s line puts a few dozen metres inside Jaboatão dos Guararapes. About 600 stood north of the Pina basin, in the centre and the north of the city, and about 260 south of it, where the pilot’s bairros are Pina and Boa Viagem; Whoosh had more there, about 160 to JET’s 100. None stood in Olinda or Camaragibe, or as far west as the UFPE campus.

The map shows JET separately in Paulista, north beyond Olinda (about 630 scooters), and in Jaboatão dos Guararapes to the south (about 560).

The map shows Go Jet and Whoosh: each Whoosh scooter’s charge and range, and each JET scooter’s charge. It shows no prices, parking points, zones or hours; the apps do. Both operators run in Porto Alegre and Florianópolis too: see e-scooters in Porto Alegre and e-scooters in Florianópolis.

The metro, the buses and the city’s bikes

Neither the Metrô do Recife, run by the federal CBTU, nor the Grande Recife Consórcio de Transporte, which runs the buses, mentions scooters aboard on the pages we read. Don’t take a shared one aboard: Whoosh charges R$80 for the metro and R$40 for a bus, and Go Jet’s terms forbid carrying its scooter in any vehicle. End the ride at a point near your station or stop.

Recife’s orange docked bikes are run by Tembici and rented in the Bike Itaú app. Bike Itaú’s Recife page, updated on 22 October 2026, lists 79 stations and 830 bikes: a day pass on the mechanical bikes costs R$9.75, with rides of up to 60 minutes (two hours on Sundays and holidays), and the pedal-assisted e-bikes, from 24 October, R$0.90 a minute with no unlock fee but a 15-minute minimum (R$13.50). In July 2026 Floresta Notícias reported that the Prefeitura was replacing the state’s Bike PE with its own Bike Recife, again run by Tembici. The map shows none of these bikes.

Did you know?

• Recife had shared scooters before. FlipOn started on 20 August 2021 with 30 scooters, and by November it had about 120 at 18 stations, mostly in Boa Viagem and the Bairro do Recife, Folha de Pernambuco reported.
• Over 50,000 rides in the first month. The operators told the Diario de Pernambuco in April 2026 that riders had made more than 50,000 trips; JET alone counted 31,930 trips by 5,860 people in its first 20 days.
• The pilot is a regulatory sandbox. Defending it in court, the Prefeitura called it one: a trial under Brazil’s start-up law (the Marco Legal das Startups) that tests a new technology on real streets before any law is settled, the Diario reported.