Brazil’s gambling-addiction numbers reopen the betting debate

Brazil’s gambling-addiction debate flared up again after Folha de S.Paulo published, on 20 October 2026, a Ministry of Labor study on work absences linked to pathological gambling. For PSPs and operators, the useful part is not the political noise: it is how little the published numbers can actually prove, and how easily they can be misread.

1. According to the Ministry of Labor study, insured workers who received temporary disability benefits from the Instituto Nacional do Seguro Social (INSS) for gambling addiction numbered 67 in 2023, 136 in 2024, and 363 in 2025. That is an increase of more than 400% in two years. The document concludes that legalization shows a close relationship with the rise in gambling addiction and proposes restricting gambling as a mental-health measure.
2. The headline percentage looks dramatic, but the absolute numbers are still small. Data from the Secretariat of Prizes and Bets of the Ministry of Finance (SPA/MF), obtained by BNLData through the Access to Information Law, show 28,128,172 unique active CPF registrations in 2025 and 30,895,934 in the first half of 2026. Against that base, 363 disability claims equal 0.0013% of registrations, or about one case per 77,000.
3. BNLData also puts the figure in a broader epidemiological frame. The World Health Organization (WHO) cites surveys suggesting that around 1.2% of adults worldwide have some form of gambling disorder. Applied to 28.1 million registrations, that would imply more than 337,000 people. But this is only a rough comparison: registrations are not necessarily active players, and INSS benefits cover only formally employed workers who went through a medical expert assessment.
4. The study itself includes important caveats. According to Folha, subsecretary Paula Montagner, who is responsible for the report, acknowledges that there are not enough data to attribute the increase in dismissals — in fact, absences — to gambling addiction. The document says the initial figures should be read carefully because they refer to small groups with access to the benefit. BNLData adds that the disorder now has higher visibility and that the Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS) created a dedicated telemedicine service.
5. BNLData also challenges the regulatory timeline. It notes that fixed-odds betting had been authorized since Law No. 13.756/2018 and operated for five years without supervision, while Law No. 14.790/2023 established rules for an already existing market. It adds that advertising rules were tightened through SPA/MF ordinances and that the regulated market only began operating on 1 January 2025, making 2024 a transition period.

For high-risk payment operators, the practical takeaway is simple: Brazil’s market has moved from policy debate to data debate, but the numbers being used in that debate are still a mix of benefit claims, registry counts, and public-health estimates that do not measure the same thing. That matters when regulators, banks, and PSPs start asking what the market actually looks like in practice.