Federal Deputy Caroline de Toni filed Bill 5,153/2026 in Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies on 24 August, six weeks before a general election, proposing to close the country’s fixed-odds betting market inside 180 days. The bill will almost certainly not become law in this legislature. Operators should read it closely anyway, because it is the most detailed statement so far of what a section of the Brazilian right intends to do with gambling policy after 4 October.
De Toni sits for the Liberal Party (PL), the largest bloc in the opposition with 91 of 151 opposition seats, and the party led by Flávio Bolsonaro. That is what makes the text worth reading. A backbench prohibition bill from a minor party is noise. The same bill from the party expecting to lead the next opposition, or the next government, is a policy draft with a date on it.
What the bill contains
The official summary registered with the Chamber is unusually blunt for Brazilian legislative drafting:
“Extingue a modalidade lotérica de apostas de quota fixa, proíbe sua exploração, oferta, promoção e facilitação em território nacional, estabelece medidas para o encerramento das autorizações vigentes, o bloqueio de acesso e a interrupção de fluxos financeiros relacionados à atividade.”
In English: it abolishes fixed-odds betting as a lottery category, bans its operation, offering, promotion and facilitation nationally, and sets out how existing authorisations are terminated, how access is blocked, and how money flows are cut off.
The mechanics are specific. Companies holding federal authorisation from the Ministry of Finance’s Secretariat of Prizes and Bets (SPA) would have 180 days from publication to stop trading. Through that window they stay bound by consumer protection law and cannot accept wagers on events settling after the deadline. After it, platforms may run only for account queries, withdrawals and settlement of open bets, with a further 90 days to pay outstanding prizes and return player balances.
Enforcement reaches past site blocking. Federal authorities could order pages taken down, apps pulled from digital stores, advertising removed and payment flows interrupted, with the restrictions covering digital wallets, cryptocurrency rails and offshore infrastructure serving Brazilian users. Operating, managing or maintaining a betting operation after the transition would carry two to five years’ imprisonment plus a fine. The same exposure applies to financiers, to anyone concealing beneficial ownership, and to providers of transaction infrastructure. Bettors face no criminal liability. The bill also amends the 1941 Penal Contraventions Law and touches the general law governing the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup.
This is not a gesture written on a napkin. Someone drafted a working shutdown procedure.
Why it stalls
Bill 5,153/2026 was still with the Chamber’s Mesa awaiting committee referral, with no urgency regime attached. Congress is about to empty out for campaigning. Committee work on a bill that would repeal a framework Congress passed in 2023, the President signed in late 2024, and the SPA has been licensing against since 1 January 2025, does not happen in six weeks.
There is a fiscal problem for anyone tempted to vote for it. The regulated market produced R$3.1bn in federal tax receipts between January and April 2026 alone, according to SBC Noticias Brasil. A deputy who votes to delete that revenue in an election year has to say what replaces it, and very few will want to answer that question in public. The Chamber’s arithmetic has not changed since it created the market.
The case being made
De Toni’s justification rests on household finances. She cites Comsefaz, the national committee of state finance secretaries, putting the flow from Brazilian family accounts to betting companies at R$62.5bn.
“Between preserving the revenue of betting platforms and preserving Brazilian family income, the state’s priority should be families,” de Toni said.
That framing has travelled fast. São Paulo Governor Tarcísio de Freitas, seeking re-election in Brazil’s wealthiest state, has taken it further, as SBC News reported this month:
“It’s simple, either Brazil ends the bets, or the bets end Brazil.”
De Freitas has also claimed that 20% to 25% of Brazilians’ income is committed to gambling, a figure SBC News reports as unsupported. It is worth being direct about what that means. An unattributed number of that size, doing campaign work for the governor of the country’s largest state, will outlive the campaign. Numbers like that end up in committee reports, then in impact assessments, then in law, long after anyone stopped asking where they came from. The industry’s problem is that it has no agreed counter-figure to put beside it.
President Lula da Silva, whose government built the licensing regime, has arrived at a similar destination from the opposite direction.
“If no one shows me a legitimate reason for these betting companies to continue, we have to put an end to them,” Lula said.
The debt argument has a competing explanation
Brazil’s Central Bank does not attribute rising household debt to betting. President Gabriel Galípolo pointed instead at credit growth, speaking at a trade event this week.
“It’s not right to be happy with the news that credit has grown and then complain that debt has increased,” Galípolo said.
He made no mention of fixed-odds betting. That is the most useful thing anyone in Brasília has said about household debt this month, and it will change nothing, because the Central Bank is not running for office in October and de Freitas is.
What operators should plan for
The realistic risk to licensed operators in 2027 is not a 180-day shutdown clock. It is the parts of this bill that can be detached and passed separately, each of which polls well and none of which costs the Treasury R$3.1bn a year.
Payment-flow restrictions are the obvious candidate. So are advertising bans, with Lula’s government already weighing a prohibition on betting brands at federally funded cultural events. So is a widening of the participation exclusions: the April 2025 decision to bar Bolsa Família recipients removed close to 60 million people from the addressable market, and there is no political cost to extending that logic to other benefit categories. Age and identity enforcement is tightening in parallel, with regulators already testing app stores on casino age checks under the ECA Digital rules. Local government is the other flank, and European operators know how that goes: Romanian councils have moved from restriction to prohibition inside a single term, with Timișoara banning new gaming halls and closing existing venues by 2027.
Flávio Bolsonaro has not committed to a total ban. His running mate Alfredo Gaspar has said the PL is still deciding between tighter restriction and outright prohibition, which tells you the party has clocked the revenue problem and wants the option value of both positions through October.
Entain, Flutter Entertainment, Superbet and Betano did not enter Brazil expecting a stable regulatory settlement, but they did enter expecting the argument to be about tax rates and advertising rules. It is now about whether the market exists. Bill 5,153/2026 will die in committee. The industry should spend the next six weeks working out which of its clauses come back one at a time, and finding a household-debt number of its own that survives scrutiny, because arguing against R$62.5bn with silence has not worked so far.
Source: Chamber of Deputies of Brazil
