ENARE

Overview

The Exame Nacional de Residência (ENARE) is Brazil's national selection process for medical, uniprofessional and multiprofessional health residency programmes. It is run by Ebserh (Empresa Brasileira de Serviços Hospitalares), a company linked to the Ministry of Education, together with the federal university hospitals and other public institutions that join the process each year. It is informally called "o Enem dos médicos" (the medical graduates' Enem) because, like the Enem, a single shared exam and shared ranking replace separate entrance processes that individual hospitals and universities used to run on their own.

For the 2026/2027 cycle, candidates applying to Direct Access (Acesso Direto) medical residency programmes are ranked using their score in ENAMED (Exame Nacional de Avaliação da Formação Médica), rather than sitting a separate Enare-specific written test. Candidates applying to programmes with a prerequisite residency (Pré-requisito), an additional year (Ano Adicional) or a defined area of practice (Área de Atuação), as well as candidates for uniprofessional and multiprofessional health residencies, sit their own Enare objective exam. Passing is only the first step: Enare produces a ranked list for each specialty and institution, and that ranking decides who gets to choose from the residency vacancies on offer.

Who can apply

• Direct Access medical residency: open to candidates who have completed the medicine degree, or are in their final semester, provided the degree is conferred before the residency programme starts. Candidates must also be registered for that year's ENAMED and reach at least the "Proficiente" performance band in it; only candidates at or above that band are considered for Enare's Direct Access ranking.

• Residency with prerequisite, additional year, or area of practice: open to doctors who have already completed, or will complete within the deadline set by that year's edital, the residency required as a prerequisite for the specialty they are applying to.

• Uniprofessional and multiprofessional health residencies: open to graduates of other health-science degrees — among them biomedicine, biological sciences, physical education, nursing, pharmacy, medical physics, physiotherapy, speech therapy, veterinary medicine, nutrition, dentistry, psychology, public/collective health and occupational therapy — who hold an active or provisional registration with their profession's regulatory council.

Exam pattern

The Prerequisite/Additional-year/Area-of-practice test draws on the same five core areas used in Brazilian medical-residency entrance exams generally, in roughly this proportion:

Most questions are short clinical-case vignettes that ask what to do next for a patient, rather than isolated recall questions.

Marking and results

Enare and ENAMED both score candidates using Item Response Theory (Teoria de Resposta ao Item, TRI) instead of a simple count of correct answers. Under TRI, each question carries its own difficulty, its own susceptibility to a lucky guess, and its own power to tell apart candidates who know the material from those who do not; two candidates with the same number of correct answers can end up with different scores if their pattern of right and wrong answers differs. For Direct Access, the ENAMED proficiency score (and performance band) is what feeds into the Enare ranking; for the other tracks, the written test's TRI-based score does.

Final results are published as a separate ranked list for each residency programme and institution. Ranking position, not the raw score by itself, decides the order in which candidates are called to choose a vacancy.

Important dates

The cycle runs once a year on a calendar Ebserh and FGV publish with that year's edital; exact dates move from year to year. For the 2026/2027 cycle:

• Registration for Direct Access programmes: 15–29 June 2026.

• Registration for Prerequisite, Additional-year and Area-of-practice programmes: 15 June – 15 July 2026 (the window was later extended by a few days in some reports).

• Written test for the Prerequisite/Additional-year/Area-of-practice track: 13 September 2026.

• Final result: expected 8 January 2027.

Candidates should always confirm the current year's dates on the official Enare site, since the registration and exam calendar is republished with each new edital.

Fees

For the 2026/2027 cycle, the registration fee is R$330 for medical residency programmes (Direct Access, Prerequisite, Additional year and Area of practice) and R$220 for uniprofessional and multiprofessional health-residency programmes. Each year's edital opens a fee-waiver (isenção) window for candidates who meet the published social-criteria requirements; a candidate whose waiver request is denied must still pay the fee within the remaining deadline to stay in the process.

How to apply

1. For Direct Access, register for that year's ENAMED first — Enare eligibility for this track depends on an ENAMED registration and performance band.

2. Register for Enare itself on the official exam portal within the registration window for the chosen track, selecting the specialty/programme and participating institution(s) of interest.

3. Pay the registration fee, or submit a fee-waiver request within its own shorter window if eligible.

4. For the Prerequisite/Additional-year/Area-of-practice and health-area tracks, sit the written test on the scheduled date.

5. Check the preliminary answer key (gabarito) and submit an appeal (recurso) within the deadline if there are grounds to.

6. Check the final ranked result once published.

After the exam

Once the final ranked lists are published, Ebserh runs a series of placement calls (chamadas) for each specialty at each participating institution: candidates are called in order of their rank to confirm interest in, and then accept, a vacancy. Participating institutions include federal university hospitals and other public health institutions across the country; the number of institutions and vacancies on offer changes from year to year and is published with that year's edital. A candidate who does not respond, or who declines, within a call's deadline loses that opportunity and the vacancy passes to the next candidate on the list; unfilled vacancies are typically offered again in further rounds.

Preparation tips

• Study the five core areas in roughly their tested proportion, giving clinical medicine and surgery the most time, without neglecting preventive/public health, gynaecology-obstetrics and paediatrics.

• Practise case-vignette multiple-choice questions that ask for the next clinical step, since that is the dominant question style, rather than relying only on recall-based revision.

• For the Direct Access track, treat ENAMED preparation as Enare preparation: the ENAMED score and performance band are what the Direct Access ranking is built on.

• Remember that scoring uses Item Response Theory, not a simple correct-answer count, so a consistent pattern of answers across easier and harder questions matters, not just the final tally.

• Review past years' answer keys and appeal outcomes (gabaritos and recursos) to understand how borderline or ambiguous questions were ultimately resolved.

FAQs