Soil water retention data are fundamental in soil modeling studies. Temperate pedotransfer functions (PTFs) have been commonly used to estimate water retention of Brazilian soils, mainly because of the lack of soil data for Brazil. However, these PTFs may not be suitable for tropical or subtropical conditions such as those found in Brazil. The objective of this study was to establish a dedicated Hydrophysical Database for Brazilian Soils (HYBRAS) suitable for PTF development. Data present in HYBRAS comprise 445 soil profiles with 1075 samples and are representative of a wide range of Brazilian soils. The data are organized in a relational structure of tables that cover general site descriptions, land cover, and hydrophysical and chemical measurement methods. Raw data (e.g., water retention points covering the 0-15,000-cm suction range) and derived data are included in the tables. Another objective of this study was to use the database to compare the accuracy of water retention estimates based on PTFs developed for Brazilian and temperate regions. In general, the Brazilian PTFs performed better than the temperate models, especially for weathered (Ferralsols, Acrisols, and Nitisols) finetextured (clay, sandy clay, clay loam, silty clay loam, and silty clay) soils. Silt content was not a successful criterion for distinguishing performance of Brazilian and temperate PTFs for Brazilian weathered soils. The water retention of weathered soils was shown to differ from that of temperate soils due to differences in pore structure resulting from their clay content and mineralogical nature, thus confirming results reported in the literature.Abbreviations: HYBRAS, Hydrophysical Database for Brazilian Soils; HYPRES, Hydraulic Properties of European Soil; ME, mean error; pF, log 10 suction; PTF, pedotransfer function; UNSODA, Unsaturated Soil Hydraulic Database; VG, van Genuchten.Soil water retention data are fundamental in soil modeling studies. Their direct measurement is costly and demands intense field work, which makes it infeasible for large areas. As a result, pedotransfer functions (PTFs) (Bouma, 1989) are being developed and used increasingly to estimate water retention data from routinely available soil measures.Brazil plays an important role in the development of tropical water retention PTFs (Botula et al., 2014). Barros and de Jong van Lier (2014) extensively reviewed water retention PTFs for Brazilian soils. These PTFs are commonly developed to estimate the available water content on the basis of field capacity and permanent wilting point, with their use often restricted to certain types of soils or geographic regions (Barros and de Jong van Lier, 2014). To our knowledge and according to Barros and de Jong van Lier (2014), the studies by Tomasella and Hodnett (1998), Tomasella et al. (2000Tomasella et al. ( , 2003, da Silva (2002), de Mello et al. (2005), Fidalski and Tormena (2007), da Silva et al. (2008), Fiorin (2008, Barros et al. (2013) and Medrado and Lima (2014) are the main publications on PTF developme...