A member of Jair Bolsonaro’s opposition Liberal Party wants Brazil’s regulated online betting market taken apart entirely. Caroline de Toni filed PL 5,153/2026 on Aug. 24, a bill that would prohibit fixed-odds sports betting and online casino games nationwide, end the federal licensing system that only started operating at the beginning of 2025, and give currently authorized operators 180 days to close down.
Fixed-odds betting on sporting and non-sporting events, virtual events, and online games all fall inside the bill’s scope. Other government-authorized lottery products stay legal, and fantasy sports remain outside the fixed-odds definition, but everything covered would be prohibited across operation, offer, promotion, advertising, sponsorship, and facilitation, with parts of Brazil’s existing gambling legislation repealed to make it happen.
Federal licenses would expire 180 days after the legislation took effect, at which point operators could no longer take new wagers or deposits and would get a further 90 days to pay out outstanding winnings and return customer balances. During that transition, companies also couldn’t accept wagers on events scheduled to finish after their authorization runs out.
Internet providers and app platforms would have to block access to prohibited operators, while banks and payment companies would have to cut off any transactions connected to them. The advertising and sponsorship ban pushes the prohibition past the operators themselves and onto anyone providing distribution, marketing, or payment infrastructure.
Fines for companies that keep operating anyway would reach R$2 billion, around $385 million, scaled to how serious and how repeated the violation is, and some prohibited activity would carry prison sentences of two to five years. Individual bettors face no criminal penalties under the bill, which puts all of its enforcement weight on operators and the companies that keep the market running.
Calls for prohibition are no longer a right-wing position. Lawmakers from President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Workers’ Party introduced PL 1,808/2026 back in April, a proposal that would prohibit the operation, offer, promotion, and facilitation of fixed-odds betting throughout Brazil, which makes De Toni’s bill the second serious prohibition attempt of the year rather than an outlier from the opposition.
Sixty-five of the PT’s 66 federal deputies signed that April proposal, joined by lawmakers from PSOL and Rede. It would repeal parts of the same 2018 and 2023 laws that hold up the regulated betting sector, and it includes provisions for blocking websites, removing applications, interrupting financial flows, and making intermediaries answerable for helping prohibited operators reach Brazilian customers. It’s still in Congress, attached to an earlier gambling bill.
Lula himself backed the idea of shutting the platforms down on April 8, pointing to household debt and gambling-related harm, and saying he would close them if the decision were his alone while conceding that an outright ban needs Congress behind it. His own government spent the previous two years building the regulatory system that a prohibition would now dismantle.
Restriction rather than elimination is still on the table too. PL 2,470/2026 is before the Senate with additional consumer, mental-health, and household-finance protections, while Senator Carlos Fávaro introduced PL 4,977/2026 in August seeking a broader prohibition covering betting operations, advertising, sponsorship, and intermediation.
The fully regulated federal market is barely 20 months old, having started on Jan. 1, 2025, when companies authorized by the Ministry of Finance’s Secretariat of Prizes and Betting became the only operators allowed to serve customers nationally. Sixty-six companies paid a combined R$2.01 billion in authorization fees to enter the system at launch, with licensed sites required to run on the .bet.br domain.
Brasília has kept enforcing that framework while support for prohibition grew around it. Authorities blocked 27 prediction-market platforms in April 2026, Polymarket and Kalshi among them, after deciding their products didn’t comply with Brazil’s existing betting rules — the government drawing a careful line between licensed betting and unauthorized products only months before lawmakers from both major political camps started pushing to erase the line by banning most of the sector.
None of the prohibition bills is close to becoming law, and De Toni’s has only just been introduced in the Chamber of Deputies. What’s changed is the number of these proposals and the political range they now cover, for a market Brazil spent years preparing to regulate. The argument in Congress has shifted from how tightly online betting should be controlled to whether the regulated market should exist at all.