Health certification for sick leave is an important task in the daily work of physicians in the Primary Health Care setting in Brazil and worldwide.Health certification for sick leave is an important task in the daily work of physicians in the Primary Health Care setting in Brazil and worldwide.This work aims to discuss about he role family physicians play in the process of health certification for sick leave in the primary health care setting in Brazil, by reviewing Brazilian and international publications and the regulations of the Federal Council of Medicine of Brazil (CFM) on this topic, in order to contribute to reflection on this issue in the Brazilian context and to propose ways to improve this task in practice.This work employs a narrative literature review methodology conducted inside the Virtual Health Library platform, that includes multiple international databases such as LILACS, Medline, Arca, among others. The research used the meSH terms "Health Certificate" and "Sick leave", and selected international and brazilian publications inside the topic. Another part of the work included the regulation research inside the federal medical council portal, in order to find revelant norms on this topic issued by the brazilian concil. Finally, gray literature was included, such as governmental publications and the main brazilian Family Medicine textbooks.The reseach was able to select twelve articles, from wich only one brazilian paper, two from other latin american countries, and the other nine papers from european countries. The results demonstrate that the topic, understudied in Brazilian journals, is a relevant theme on the agenda of European countries and contextualizes the discussion within the scenario of welfare states.The study discusses the particularities of the role of the primary health care physician in Brazil, the technical component of disability assessment and the federal concil regulations.It is concluded that the topic demands more studies in the Brazilian context, as it is a complex task of social relevance, whose improvement depends on intersectoral articulation, the articulation of the health care network, and a training process for professionals working in primary health care.