Brazil’s provisional measure banning fixed-odds betting: what happens to states and operators

On September 25, Brazil published a provisional measure banning fixed-odds betting nationwide. The text gives operators 10 days to take sites and apps offline, and 30 days for authorizations granted since 2025 to expire, while also saying the money already paid for those licenses will not be returned.

1. In Brazil’s terms, bet means fixed-odds betting, a lottery product created by Law 13.756/2018 and regulated by Law 14.790/2023. The key difference from traditional lotteries is simple: in a bet, the player knows the payout at the time of the wager, while in traditional lottery products the prize is mutualized from the pool of collected stakes.
2. The provisional measure affects the whole country. It says that in 30 days all authorizations granted since 2025 will be extinguished, and in 10 days websites and apps must go offline. Each operator paid up to 30 million reais for a five-year federal authorization; at the state level, the amounts are lower.
3. The measure also states, in a single paragraph, that none of those amounts will be refunded and that no compensation is due. For operators, that is not a detail buried in the footnotes: it is the financial core of the dispute, because the text simultaneously ends the licenses and keeps the fees.
4. On the constitutional question, the author argues that provisional measures are meant for urgent situations that cannot wait for ordinary legislative procedure. The point is not abstract: the betting sector had been regulated, authorized, and supervised by the federal government for almost two years, with the Ministry of Finance issuing dozens of ordinances, approving systems, collecting license fees, and applying sanctions.
5. There is also a sharper legal issue. Since Brazil’s 2001 constitutional reform, provisional measures have been expressly barred from dealing with the seizure or retention of assets, popular savings, or any other financial asset. The article says this measure does exactly that by freezing incoming funds in operators’ accounts, ordering segregation and immobilization of balances, and creating administrative forfeiture of blocked amounts.

For high-risk payment teams, the practical question is not just whether the ban survives judicial review. It is what happens to acquiring flows, settlement accounts, and blocked balances while the legal fight plays out — exactly the sort of mess that turns a licensing issue into a payments problem fast.