Budgeting is one of the oldest planning and control systems adopted by the companies, and continues to receive significant attention. Despite being widely used in the business world, budgeting is also oftentimes the target of criticism. Therefore, this work aims at demonstrating budgeting practices in port companies in Brazil. The work presents a quantitative and qualitative approach, with a descriptive and exploratory objective, and the use of a survey. The research was conducted by sending the survey to Brazilian public ports. The results show that the Brazilian ports use only a few budgeting practices. Among the main features identified in the study there are the lack of alignment between the budgeting and strategic planning and of the internal evaluation of the results and the partial application of control mechanisms. These characteristics show that Brazilian public ports have opportunities for improvement in different budgeting practices.