Access the Brazilian 'MDS' Social Information Matrix ('MI Social') API from 'R'

'Tidyverse'-friendly interface to the 'MI Social' API of the Brazilian Ministry of Development and Social Assistance ('MDS', 'SAGI') < https://aplicacoes.mds.gov.br/sagi/servicos/misocial>. Retrieves monthly municipal series of the 'Cadastro Unico' (registered families and people by income bracket), the 'Bolsa Familia' programme (beneficiary families, benefits and transfers), the 'BPC' benefit, the social assistance network ('CRAS', 'CREAS' and other units), 'SUAS' funding, 'Bolsa Familia' conditionality monitoring and food security programmes as tidy long-format 'tibbles'.

misocialr

Tidyverse-friendly R interface to the MI Social API (Matriz de Informação Social) of the Brazilian Ministry of Development and Social Assistance (MDS/SAGI): https://aplicacoes.mds.gov.br/sagi/servicos/misocial.

The package follows the architecture of ibger: a small English public API, long-format tibble output, validation before any request, in-memory per-session cache and offline tests with httptest2 fixtures. The sibling Python package, misocialpy, mirrors the same functions, name by name.

Themes

The fields of each theme are in mds_fields(). Any other field of the API (mds_api_fields()) can be requested by name in mds_data().

Installation

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("StrategicProjects/misocial", subdir = "misocialr")

Requires R >= 4.1, httr2 >= 1.0.4, cli >= 3.6.1, dplyr >= 1.1.1 and purrr >= 1.0.0 (tests: testthat >= 3.2.1).

Usage

library(misocialr)

mds_bolsa_familia(
  periods = c(202508, 202509),
  localities = 2611606,            # Recife (6 or 7 digits)
  fields = c("qtd_familias_beneficiarias_bolsa_familia_i",
             "valor_repassado_bolsa_familia_f")
)
#> # A tibble: 4 × 9  (selected columns)
#>   ibge_code locality_name period field                                      unit        value
#> 1 2611606   RECIFE        202508 qtd_familias_beneficiarias_bolsa_familia_i Famílias   140350
#> 2 2611606   RECIFE        202509 qtd_familias_beneficiarias_bolsa_familia_i Famílias   139452
#> 3 2611606   RECIFE        202508 valor_repassado_bolsa_familia_f            R$       92124240
#> 4 2611606   RECIFE        202509 valor_repassado_bolsa_familia_f            R$       93354456

Accepted formats:

• periods: NULL (last 12 months), -n (last n months), years (2024) and/or YYYYMM months (202401).
• localities: "BR", states ("PE" or 26), municipalities with 6 or 7 digits, combined freely.

Output columns: locality_id (6 digits, as in the API), ibge_code (7 digits), locality_name, state, period, field, label, unit, value.

Months not yet published

The API answers 0, not "missing", for months that were not published yet. mds_periods() shows this: n_nonzero counts only the municipalities with a non-zero value.

mds_periods("bpc_ben_i", localities = "PE") |> tail(5)
#>   period n_localities n_nonzero
#> 1 202608          185       185
#> 2 202609          185         0
#> 3 202610          185         0
#> 4 202611          185         0
#> 5 202612          185         0

mds_drop_unpublished() removes those zeros explicitly: future months and months after the last month with a non-zero value. A zero in the middle of the series, followed by a month with a value, is kept. The outputs above come from queries made on 2026-10-19.

The "last month with a value" can come from two places:

• reference = "selection" (default): the localities of the query itself. No extra request, but in a small selection a legitimate trailing zero (a municipality without a CREAS, say) is removed as well.
• reference = "brazil": the whole country, via mds_periods(). A month is only removed when no municipality in Brazil has a value; legitimate zeros of small selections are preserved.

Validation and errors

The query is checked before any data request, and the cases below are errors with a message, instead of an empty or silently different result:

• empty locality (character(0)), NA or empty string, which used to turn into a query for the whole of Brazil;
• an invalid locality even next to "BR" (c("BR", "Recifex"));
• a 7-digit code with a wrong check digit (2611600 instead of 2611606, which used to query Recife);
• an empty, NA, non-integer (-1.9) period, or a negative period mixed with others;
• a text field (regiao) or an identification field (municipio): the package only returns numeric values;
• an incomplete or malformed API response: an empty page before numFound, a partial Solr result, a negative or non-integer numFound, missing docs or facet_counts, a total that changes while paging, a document read twice, a document without municipality or month, a field with more than one value in the same document;
• two different values for the same municipality, month and field.

Every response is checked before it is used or cached: a failure of the source does not become "no data" for the rest of the session.

Errors are classed, for programmatic handling: misocialr_error_validation (input), misocialr_error_response (incomplete response), misocialr_error_conflict (the source contradicts itself) and misocialr_error_http (network, with status and the original error in parent); all inherit from misocialr_error. A requested municipality with no document raises the warning misocialr_warning_missing.

Unpublished months: remove or flag

mds_drop_unpublished() never deletes a non-zero value. With reference = "brazil", if the national reference says that a month with a value was not published, it is queried again; if the contradiction remains, the month is kept with a warning. To inspect before removing:

mds_drop_unpublished(x, action = "flag")
# adds publication_status ("published", "future", "unpublished",
# "missing"), publication_reason and publication_reference

This is an inference from the published values, not an official publication date.

Options

• options(misocialr.timeout = 300): maximum time per request, in seconds (default 180).
• options(misocialr.quiet = TRUE): hides the progress messages.
• attr(x, "retrieved_at"): date and time of the query that produced x (also in mds_periods() and mds_localities()).
• options(misocialr.cache_ttl = 3600): cache validity, in seconds (the default is the whole session).
• Cache: refresh = TRUE in mds_periods(), mds_localities() and mds_api_fields() queries a result again; mds_clear_cache() clears everything. Equivalent selections (c("PE", "PB") and c("PB", "PE")) share the result.
• mds_localities(period = ) picks the month of the municipality list.
• Retries: up to 3 attempts in total on 429/5xx and on connection failure, with Retry-After capped at 30 s per attempt and 120 s in total; options(misocialr.retry_backoff = 2) sets the wait between them.
• Queries go by POST: with many months, fields and municipalities, the URL of a GET would exceed the server limit (HTTP 414).
• periods accepts years from 2000 to the year after the current one (the API starts in 2003-01).

Summing safely

mds_fields() tells the nature of each field (nature) and where that classification comes from (nature_basis):

nature_basis = "medido" means the monthly series was inspected (a running total only grows; a monthly value oscillates and restarts); the others are inferences from the group or from the label and unit.

Known limits

• Paging uses cursorMark, which walks by key rather than by position; the package still flags a changing total and a repeated document. A long query sees the source as it was at each page, not as a single snapshot.
• The classification of unpublished months is an inference from the values, not an official publication date.
• R and Python follow the same behaviour cases (tests/testthat/paridade/casos.json), but parity is only guaranteed for what those cases cover.

Notes on the fields

• storage_type says how the value is stored in the API (suffix _i, _l, _f, _d, _s), not what it measures.
• The API publishes no data dictionary. The labels in mds_fields() are a reading of the technical names; all 130 fields were checked against the API (data-raw/check_dictionary.R). CRAS and CREAS appear in two themes (bpc_suas and suas_rede).
• The Cadastro Único income brackets are disjoint and sum: in Brazil, 2025-08, poverty (19,452,231) + low income (7,828,004) = up to ½ minimum wage (27,280,235). "Low income" is the bracket between the poverty line and ½ minimum wage.
• FNAS transfers: the components sum to the total (PE, 2026-06: 7,625,605, including the "fundo a fundo" line; 2026-09: 11,684,831). The account balances do not sum to the overall total; read them one by one. Components that stopped being published were left out (SUAS management since 2022, PSE média/alta since 2011, PAB since 2023).
• IGD-M: value without incentives + incentives = value with incentives (PE, 2026-08). igdm_f is an index: do not sum across municipalities.
• Conditionalities (SICON, since 2023): in education, monitored + no information = target group (Recife, 2026-07: 110,464 + 16,896 = 127,360); in health, children + women = people. Warning + blocking + suspension + cancellation = sanctions, for BF (family benefit) and BVA (benefit of 16–17-year-olds), as in MDS Informe Bolsa Família no. 44. External check: Brazil, 2024-03, equal to Informe no. 37 in all six numbers (BF 201,726 warnings, 80,543 blockings, 64,915 suspensions; BVA 74,853, 40,474 and 50,015); 2024-05 equal to the state table of Informe no. 44 (BF 230,466, 44,247 and 36,851).
• Cisterns are cumulative counts: do not sum months.
• pbf_qtd_familias_quilombolas_benef_i and pbf_qtd_familias_sit_rua_benef_i have the same value in every municipality and month (PE 2020–2026: 14,615 of 14,615 pairs; Brazil 2025-09: 5,570 of 5,570, summing 283,923), and Recife shows 1 homeless family. They were left out of the dictionary until the source fixes them.
• The Cadastro Único has no month 2025-04 in the API itself (mds_periods("cadun_qtd_familias_cadastradas_i") jumps from 202503 to 202505).
• pbf_qtd_familias_benef_i is not the total of Bolsa Família families (Recife, 2024-02: 9,847, against 146,737 in qtd_familias_beneficiarias_bolsa_familia_i). It is out of the dictionary.

Development

Rscript -e 'testthat::test_local(".")'   # tests, offline
Rscript data-raw/record_fixtures.R        # re-records fixtures (network)
Rscript data-raw/check_dictionary.R       # checks the dictionary against the API (network)