Brazil will switch off its licensed betting sites on 6 October, 21 months after the market opened. India banned online money games last year, and Britain and Australia have tightened the rules.
Brazil’s betting operators asked the Supreme Court on 28 September to suspend a ban that shuts their online betting sites on 6 October. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed it on 25 September, nine days before Brazilians vote. It puts Brazil alongside India, which outlawed all online money games in August 2025.
Britain and Australia have tightened the rules without closing their markets. Britain capped online slots at £5 a spin for adults aged 25 and over in April 2025. The limit for 18 to 24-year-olds, set a month later, is £2. Australia will ban betting adverts during live sport and in venues from January 2027. US legal sports betting is still growing. Its revenue rose 22.8% to $16.96bn in 2025, according to the American Gaming Association, the industry’s trade body.
What Brazil is shutting
Brazil’s regulated market opened on 1 January 2025. In its first year, 25.2 million Brazilians bet with 79 licensed firms, Finance Ministry figures show. After paying out winnings, those firms kept about R$37bn ($7.1bn, £5.4bn). That’s what bettors lost, or roughly R$1,470 ($280, £210) for each of them over the year.
Federal taxes and levies on those firms raised R$8.8bn ($1.7bn, £1.3bn) between January and November 2025. The ban gives up that income, and the government’s own memo puts the lost tax at R$5.15bn ($990m, £750m) in 2027 alone.
Provisional Measure 1,394 bans sports betting and online casino games, including foreign sites that target Brazilians. Lotteries and horse racing are exempt. Each firm paid R$30m ($5.8m, £4.3m) for a five-year licence. The measure refunds none of it, an analysis of the text by the trade site Yogonet shows. Banks must refuse betting payments, and the central bank will build a system to block them in real time.
Why the government acted
Health Ministry data puts the number of Brazilians who bet in the previous 12 months at 28 million. Nearly four in ten of them, 10.9 million people, showed risky or problem gambling. Public health treatment for gambling disorders rose about 140% between 2018 and 2025. The health policy institute IEPS, whose study the ministry cites, puts the annual social cost at R$38.8bn ($7.5bn, £5.6bn). That’s more than the licensed firms kept from bettors.
In August 2024 alone, the central bank found, 5 million people in Bolsa Família households sent R$3bn ($580m, £430m) to betting firms. Bolsa Família is Brazil’s main cash transfer for low-income families, so the figure shows betting reaching the poorest homes. “It’s like cancer, you take out the tumor, or the tumor will kill us,” Lula said.
On 28 September, the Attorney General’s Office also sued 17 operators. It seeks R$1bn ($190m, £145m) in collective damages and R$2.6bn ($500m, £380m) to cover public health costs.
Where the money goes after a ban
Before the ban, a survey by LCA Consultores and Instituto Locomotiva put the unlicensed share of Brazilian betting at 38% to 44%. That was in May 2026, down from 41% to 51% a year earlier. The industry’s Brazilian Institute for Responsible Gaming commissioned it.
State finance secretaries reach a similar result by a different route. Their committee, Comsefaz, estimates that families lost R$62.5bn ($12bn, £9.1bn) to all betting, legal and illegal, in 2025. Set against the licensed firms’ R$37bn, that implies about 40% of losses went to sites the state couldn’t tax.
Since the ban was announced, the monitoring platform Bet Legal has counted 428 new illegal betting domains in three days. Between June and August, about 14 appeared each day, so the pace has risen roughly tenfold.
After India’s 2025 ban, a commercial study by the venture fund Lumikai estimated that about one in three former players moved offshore. Offshore operators kept marketing to Indians too, and made up 72% of the advertising violations the national advertising regulator flagged in its 2025-26 year.
The tests ahead
Congress has 120 days to approve the measure, or it lapses. Justice Luiz Fux must first rule on the industry’s request to suspend it. Election timing has shaped other recent policy moves, including pre-election handouts in Germany and the US.
Allwyn gets 6% to 7% of its earnings from Betano, whose largest market is Brazil. Entain said it was “disappointed by this sudden development”.
Payments data will show whether the ban cuts what Brazilian families lose, and treatment numbers will show whether it cuts harm. Offshore traffic will show whether bettors follow India’s players abroad. If they do, Brazil will keep much of the harm and lose the tax. The offshore sites that gain from a ban sit outside the country that imposes it. That makes payment blocks and cross-border cooperation as important as the ban itself.
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