Brazil’s betting ban ignores the evidence and widens the illegal market

The federal government published Provisional Measure No. 1,394/2026 on Friday, banning fixed-odds betting in Brazil. For operators, PSPs, and acquiring partners, the bigger issue is not the policy itself; it is the signal that a licensed activity can be switched off by decree after the state spent years building the market.

1. The measure was issued without a regulatory, economic, or social impact study, according to the text. Fixed-odds betting had been created under Law 13.756/2018 and regulated by Law 14.790/2023, which came from the Executive Branch and was signed in December 2023.
2. To operate in Brazil, companies spent months under review by the Secretaria de Prêmios e Apostas (SPA), paid R$ 30 million licensing fees valid for five years, established headquarters in Brazil, built compliance and anti-money laundering structures, and began operating in January 2025. Less than two years later, the same government used a provisional measure to shut down the activity it had authorized.
3. The legal risk is broader than gaming. The article’s point is that any investor looking at Brazil now has to price in the possibility that a lawful business today may stop being lawful tomorrow. A provisional measure loses effectiveness if it is not converted into law within 120 days, yet the effects here are immediate: new deposits are suspended, platforms are set to come down at the start of October, and authorizations expire in 30 days.
4. The government says betting is a major driver of household debt, but the official numbers cited do not support that claim. According to the SPA, 25.2 million Brazilians bet in 2025, and operators’ gross gaming revenue (GGR) reached R$ 36.9 billion. That works out to an average loss of about R$ 1,460 per bettor per year, or R$ 122 per month.
5. The Banco Central president, Gabriel Galípolo, pointed in August to other sources of stress: of 96 million credit card users, 52.8 million have revolving debt or installment balances with interest; private payroll lending grew 145% in a little more than a year, with delinquency rising from 5% to 6.7%; and the September Monetary Policy Report attributed record income stress to the cost of credit, without mentioning betting once.

On gambling harm, the article makes a narrower point: problem gambling should be treated seriously, but there is no robust post-regulation study showing that the disorder affects a significant share of the population. The strongest national data cited is LENAD III from Unifesp, collected in 2023, when the market was still informal and favored the illegal side.