Lula’s betting ban threat collides with a BRL8.747 billion tax stream

Brazil’s president has threatened to shut down the online betting companies his government licensed, and trade reports say a casino ban is being prepared.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said in a livestream on Sunday that, if it were up to him, online betting companies would be shut down. He said he had met eight people he described as victims of online betting, and he has promised a measure he called drastic at a meeting with civil society, health, religious and consumer groups. Nothing has been formally announced.

Lula illustrated the harm with individual stories from those meetings, saying “Today I met a young man who made 1,400 Pix transfers in three months, and the Central Bank didn’t detect that this was an excessive number of transfers to the same company?” He also spoke of a bettor who accumulated BRL2 million ($388,410) in debt in three months of wagering.

The fiscal mathematics sit awkwardly beside that rhetoric. Sports betting alone delivered BRL8.747 billion to public coffers in the first seven months of 2026, and the Federal Revenue Service estimates the total could reach BRL16 billion by year end. In 2025, nearly BRL9 billion was collected from sportsbooks. The government has been raising the levy as well: the tax on gross gaming revenue, the operators’ earnings after winnings are paid out, is set to rise from 12% to 18% by 2028.

That dependence appears to be shaping the reported plan. According to local media, the measures under preparation target online casino activity for a complete ban but spare sports betting, which trade reports attribute to the decision to keep collecting tax from Brazilians’ wagering. The reports also point to advertising restrictions on sports betting and an electoral programme for people affected by problem gambling.

Inside the government, the finance minister has drawn a similar line. Dario Durigan, in the role since March, has outlined a preference for tighter restrictions on online gambling, but not an outright ban.

Timing complicates everything. Brazil’s general election falls on 4 October 2026, and Lula’s main opponent, Liberal Party leader Flávio Bolsonaro, has also been weighing an online gambling ban, making the sector a campaign issue for both camps. The regulated market itself only opened in December 2025 under Law No. 14,790, so operators are barely a year into investments the state courted and is now reportedly preparing to curtail. Whether the ban becomes official policy is not yet decided.

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