The History of Gambling Law in Brazil
Brazil banned almost all gambling in 1946 and kept that ban in place, largely unchanged, for nearly 80 years. The prohibition — Decreto-Lei 9.215, signed by President Eurico Gaspar Dutra on 30 April 1946 — closed around 70 casinos overnight and pushed games of chance into a legal grey zone governed by a 1941 misdemeanours statute, where jogo do bicho (the “animal game”, an illegal numbers lottery) became a tolerated, deeply embedded national institution instead. That changed only in 2023–2025: Lei 14.790/2023 built a full licensing regime under a new federal regulator, the Secretaria de Prêmios e Apostas (SPA), and a regulated fixed-odds betting market went live on 1 January 2025. Physical casinos and bingo halls remain illegal as of mid-2026, with a legalisation bill still stuck in the Senate.
Colonial and imperial lotteries
Long before casinos or bicheiros (jogo do bicho operators), lotteries were Brazil’s original state-tolerated gambling. Historical accounts trace the first recorded Brazilian lottery to 1784 in Vila Rica, now Ouro Preto, where ticket proceeds helped fund the town’s Casa de Câmara e Cadeia (council house and jail) — a Portuguese colonial practice, modelled on lotteries already run in Lisbon, of licensing draws to Santas Casas de Misericórdia, hospitals, orphanages and, occasionally, private promoters.
After independence, Emperor Dom Pedro II brought the practice under direct imperial control. Decreto nº 357, of 27 April 1844, regulated the extraction (draw) of lotteries across the Empire, formalising a patchwork of local concessions into a single legal framework and setting a precedent that would recur throughout Brazilian history: gambling as a state-licensed, state-supervised activity rather than a free market.
The birth of jogo do bicho: a zoo, a baron and a raffle
Brazil’s most enduring illegal gambling institution began as a marketing gimmick. Baron João Batista Viana Drummond, a monarchist politician close to the imperial family, built the Jardim Zoológico (zoo) in the Vila Isabel neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro in 1888. By the early 1890s the zoo’s running costs had become a burden, and in 1890 Drummond obtained authorisation from Rio’s municipal government to run public games on the grounds, including a sorteio (raffle) tied to twenty-five animals printed on the zoo’s admission tickets.
On Sunday 3 July 1892, that raffle became the jogo do bicho as Brazilians would come to know it: buyers picked one of twenty-five animals printed on their entrance ticket, and a winning animal was drawn each day, paying twenty times the ticket’s face value. The idea proved far more popular than the zoo itself. Within a few years the animal-linked numbers game had escaped Vila Isabel entirely, spreading through Rio’s streets as an informal, cash-based lottery run by local bookmakers rather than the zoo — the format that would later be criminalised, driven underground, and ultimately outlive the very casinos that were legal at the time of its invention.
The Belle Époque casino era
From the 1920s to the mid-1940s, Brazil ran one of the largest legal casino industries in the world, closely tied to its tourism ambitions. The Copacabana Palace hotel opened in Rio de Janeiro in 1923 with an in-house casino and quickly became a byword for South American glamour, hosting international stars and heads of state. In 1933 the entrepreneur Joaquim Rolla — nicknamed the “Roulette King” — converted the old Hotel Balneário da Urca (built in 1922 to mark Brazil’s independence centenary) into the Cassino da Urca, one of the largest gaming and entertainment venues in Latin America, famous for its stage shows as much as its tables.
Rolla went on to build a small casino empire, with venues in Pampulha (Belo Horizonte) and Icaraí (Niterói), and his most ambitious project of all: the Cassino Quitandinha in Petrópolis, designed with a gaming hall under a 50-metre dome and conceived as the largest casino in Latin America. Alongside Rio, São Paulo and Minas Gerais became the country’s three casino “capitals”, and spa towns such as Petrópolis, Poços de Caldas, Lambari and Caxambu built their tourist economies substantially around roulette, baccarat and the live orchestras and cabaret acts the casinos imported to fill their halls.
The 1946 prohibition
That era ended abruptly. Three months into his presidency, General Eurico Gaspar Dutra signed Decreto-Lei nº 9.215 on 30 April 1946, prohibiting the practice or exploitation of jogos de azar (games of chance) across the entire national territory. The decree-law is short — four articles — but decisive: Article 1 restored the nationwide validity of Article 50 of the 1941 Lei das Contravenções Penais (Law of Penal Misdemeanours, discussed below); Article 2 revoked three Vargas-era decree-laws (nº 241/1938, nº 5.089/1942 and nº 5.192/1943) that had created the permissive licensing regime under which the Belle Époque casinos operated; and Article 3 nullified every federal, state and municipal licence, concession or authorisation that had been granted under those revoked decrees. Article 4 made the ban effective immediately on publication.
Dutra’s official justification invoked Brazil’s “tradição moral, jurídica e religiosa” (moral, legal and religious tradition), framing gambling as “nocivos à moral e aos bons costumes” (harmful to morals and good customs). His real motivations are still debated by historians: some read the decree as a deliberate break from the Vargas Estado Novo era it followed; others point to the influence of Dutra’s devoutly Catholic wife, First Lady Carmela Telles Ribeiro Dutra. Whatever the cause, the economic effect was immediate — around 70 casinos closed nationwide, and towns such as Petrópolis, Poços de Caldas, Lambari and Caxambu, whose tourist economies had depended heavily on casino visitors, lost a core source of income overnight.
A misdemeanour, not a crime: the Contravenções Penais framework
Crucially, Dutra’s decree did not create a new criminal offence — it revived an existing one. Article 50 of Decreto-Lei nº 3.688, of 3 October 1941 (the Lei das Contravenções Penais, enacted during the Vargas Estado Novo), had already made it a contravenção penal — a low-level misdemeanour, legally distinct from and less severe than a crime (crime) under Brazilian law — to establish or operate games of chance in a public place or a place accessible to the public. The penalty was simple imprisonment of three months to one year plus a fine, with confiscation of furniture and gaming equipment on conviction; the penalty rose by a third if a minor was involved among staff or players.
Article 50’s own paragraphs did much of the definitional work that still matters today: §3 defines jogo de azar as any game in which winning or losing depends exclusively or mainly on chance, plus unauthorised horse-race betting and wagers on sporting competitions; §4 extends “place accessible to the public” to private homes, hotels, club premises and any establishment disguised as something else. A separate paragraph penalising participants (as “ponto” or “apostador”) was updated by Lei nº 13.155/2015 to a fine of R$2,000 to R$200,000 and to explicitly cover betting “pela internet ou por qualquer outro meio de comunicação” (via the internet or any other means of communication) — decades before Brazil had a licensed online betting market, the misdemeanour statute was already being amended to catch it.
This choice of legal register — misdemeanour rather than crime — is one reason Brazil’s gambling ban proved so porous in practice: contravenções penais carry lighter procedural weight, lower police priority and far less social stigma than a criminal conviction, which helps explain why an activity nominally illegal since 1946 could still operate as openly as jogo do bicho did for most of the twentieth century.
Jogo do bicho becomes a national institution
Jogo do bicho’s own criminal status has a separate, slightly tangled history. It was first specifically criminalised by Article 58 of the same 1941 Lei das Contravenções Penais, with penalties of four months to one year’s imprisonment. That article was itself superseded in 1944: Decreto-Lei nº 6.259, of 10 February 1944 (Brazil’s foundational lottery-service law), redefined jogo do bicho in its own Article 58 — describing it as a game in which a participant (the “comprador” or “ponto”) hands over money indicating a combination of numbers or an animal name corresponding to numbers — and set a higher minimum penalty than the provision it replaced.
None of this stopped the game from becoming, in practice, one of Brazil’s most durable informal institutions. Bicheiros (jogo do bicho operators) built territorial networks across Rio de Janeiro and other states, and by the mid-twentieth century some had begun consciously converting illicit gambling profits into social and cultural capital by financing Rio’s samba schools, whose public subsidies were chronically inadequate to fund Carnival on the scale audiences expected. The pattern intensified through the 1960s and after: figures such as Castor de Andrade, patron of Mocidade Independente de Padre Miguel and founder of the Liga Independente das Escolas de Samba (Liesa), openly combined bicho money with Carnival patronage, buying respectability and political protection in the same transaction. That entanglement between organised jogo do bicho operations, samba-school finance and tolerant policing — sustained, historians argue, by widespread “vista grossa” (deliberate official blindness) — made jogo do bicho far harder to suppress than an ordinary illegal lottery, and it remains, as of 2026, still formally illegal yet culturally ubiquitous.
The state’s own monopoly: Caixa Econômica Federal
While private gambling was criminalised, the state built its own lottery monopoly in parallel. Caixa Econômica Federal, a federal public bank founded in 1861, had its role as national lottery operator consolidated in law through Decreto-Lei nº 204/1967, which made lottery exploitation an exclusive public service of the Union, and Decreto-Lei nº 759, of 12 August 1969, which specifically authorised Caixa to run the Loteria Federal do Brasil and the Loteria Esportiva Federal on an exclusive basis. Under Brazil’s 1988 Constitution, the competence to legislate on lotteries and prize draws sits with the Union alone — a point the Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF), Brazil’s Supreme Court, has repeatedly confirmed when states or municipalities have tried to regulate the field themselves. For half a century, Caixa’s numbered draws were effectively the only form of nationwide legal betting Brazil had.
Lei 13.756/2018: legalisation in principle, delay in practice
The first crack in the 1946 framework for sports betting specifically came with Lei nº 13.756, of 12 December 2018. Chapter V of that law (Articles 29–35) created a new lottery modality, apostas de quota fixa (fixed-odds betting), and — unlike Caixa’s existing draws — designed it from the outset to be run “em ambiente concorrencial” (in a competitive environment), with the Ministry of Finance empowered to authorise or grant licences to private operators rather than reserving the activity to Caixa alone. On paper, this legalised sports betting nationally for the first time since 1946.
In practice, the law created only a framework, not a market: it took more than five years of regulatory drafting — spanning changes of government — before any operator could obtain an authorisation and legally accept a bet. The gap between “legalised” and “regulated” defined Brazilian sports betting for most of this period: operators, mostly licensed abroad, marketed heavily to Brazilian bettors in a legal limbo the 2018 law had opened but not yet filled.
Lei 14.790/2023 and the 2024 regulatory build-out
That gap closed with Lei nº 14.790, of 29 December 2023, which supplied the detailed regulatory architecture Lei 13.756/2018 had lacked. It created the Secretaria de Prêmios e Apostas (SPA), housed within the Ministério da Fazenda (Ministry of Finance), as the dedicated regulator responsible for authorising, supervising and sanctioning fixed-odds betting operators nationwide. Companies wishing to operate must obtain an outorga (authorisation/licence grant) costing R$30 million, valid for five years and covering up to three commercial brands; additional authorisations, each also priced at R$30 million, are required for further groups of brands beyond the first three.
The law also set substantive rules for how licensed operators must run their business. It bars betting on events involving animal cruelty or violence, on markets that could compromise sporting integrity, and on anything tied to criminal proceedings; it requires bettors to be adults (18 or over) who self-declare their majority at registration; it requires full identification — name, date of birth, CPF (Brazilian taxpayer number), address and banking details — reinforced, for anti-money-laundering purposes, by document checks and facial-recognition “proof of life” verification; and it requires that deposits and withdrawals move through an account held in the bettor’s own name, closing off a common laundering technique. Through 2024, the SPA translated these principles into detailed operating rules via regulatory ordinances, notably Portaria SPA/MF nº 827, of 21 May 2024, which set out the licensing process, technical and compliance requirements, and baseline advertising standards operators would have to meet before going live.
1 January 2025: the regulated market goes live
The regulated fixed-odds betting market began operating fully on 1 January 2025. From that date, only companies holding SPA authorisation could legally offer betting services to Brazilian consumers, and every authorised operator was required to run its Brazilian-facing operation from a “.bet.br” domain, making licensed status visible in the address bar itself. An initial cohort of 66 companies received provisional authorisation to operate during the transition, with the SPA granting definitive (permanent) authorisation to a first group of 21 of those companies on 11 February 2025. The regulator has continued processing applications since; independent trackers of the SPA’s published operator list counted roughly 187–188 authorised platforms by July 2026, though the SPA’s own live registry is the only authoritative source for the current figure at any given moment.
Enforcement and the 2025–26 aftermath
Regulation did not eliminate the unlicensed market; it created a parallel enforcement effort against it. The SPA has repeatedly asked Anatel (Brazil’s national telecommunications regulator) to order internet service providers to block unauthorised betting sites: reporting in early 2026 put the tally at more than 25,000 sites blocked in the regulated market’s first year, tied to roughly 350 unauthorised operators. Finance Minister Dario Durigan put the cumulative total at “quase 50 mil” (almost 50,000) sites, tied to the same roughly 350 operators, on 19 June 2026, and press reporting citing Folha de S.Paulo put the figure at around 54,000 sites by 8 July 2026, with the total continuing to climb. Financial-sector reporting has run in parallel — 54 institutions filed 1,255 suspicious-activity communications covering 1,687 individuals suspected of moving money to illegal betting sites, leading to the closure of 550 bank accounts, 265 of them already classified as linked to illegal operators.
The Senate opened a Comissão Parlamentar de Inquérito (CPI, parliamentary committee of inquiry) into the betting sector — the “CPI das Bets” — in November 2024, chaired by Senator Dr. Hiran (PP-RR) with Senator Soraya Thronicke (Podemos-MS) as rapporteur. Thronicke’s final report, presented in June 2025, proposed twenty legislative and regulatory measures — including a ban on online casino-style games, criminal penalties for predatory advertising and a national bettor registry — and requested that prosecutors pursue sixteen individuals and companies, including the influencers Virgínia Fonseca and Deolane Bezerra, over alleged fraud, misleading advertising, money laundering and organised crime. The committee itself rejected the report by 4 votes to 3 on 12 June 2025, the first time in a decade a CPI report had failed in the Senate; Thronicke said she would forward the underlying material directly to the Polícia Federal, the Procuradoria-Geral da República, the Ministry of Justice and the presidency regardless.
A parallel controversy concerns welfare recipients. A Datafolha survey found that around 17% of Bolsa Família (Brazil’s flagship cash-transfer programme) beneficiaries reported having bet online, with a substantial share of that group saying they spent more than R$100 a month. The Tribunal de Contas da União (TCU, the federal audit court) went further in a report based on Central Bank data: in January 2025 alone, Bolsa Família beneficiary households transferred approximately R$3.7 billion to betting platforms — equivalent to 27% of the R$13.7 billion the programme disbursed that month — with about 21.9% of the 20.3 million beneficiary families showing some contact with betting sites, and just 4.4% of betting families responsible for 80% of the money transferred. The TCU flagged “strong indications” of irregular use of beneficiaries’ CPF numbers, warning the pattern could point to money laundering or other fraud, and gave the Ministry of Social Development and the Central Bank 90 days to propose remedies.
Advertising has also tightened, in two stages. The SPA’s 2024 portarias already imposed baseline advertising standards on licensed operators. A further bill, PL 2.985/2023, went beyond that baseline: the Senate approved it on 28 May 2025, banning the use of athletes, ex-athletes (other than those retired more than five years), artists, broadcasters, influencers or public authorities in betting advertising, restricting sponsor-brand visibility in sports broadcasts to a 21:00–06:00 window with no promise of winnings, and limiting social-media advertising to authenticated adult users. As of July 2026, PL 2.985/2023 remains pending in the Chamber of Deputies and has not yet been signed into law.
The unresolved question: casinos and bingo
Physical casinos and bingo halls are the one major piece of Brazil’s 1946 gambling ban that regulation has not touched. PL 2.234/2022, a Senate bill, would authorise land-based casinos (including those integrated into resorts and tourist developments, and on maritime and river vessels), legalise bingo halls, formally legalise jogo do bicho, and permit betting on horse racing. The bill’s rapporteur, Senator Irajá (PSD-TO), secured its approval in the Comissão de Constituição e Justiça (Constitution and Justice Committee) on 19 June 2024 by 14 votes to 12. Since then, however, it has stalled: a request to fast-track a floor vote was rejected on 18 December 2025 by 36 votes to 28, keeping the bill on the ordinary legislative timetable rather than an expedited one. As of mid-2026, PL 2.234/2022 remains under debate in the Senate and has not been enacted — casinos, bingo halls and jogo do bicho are all, formally, still illegal in Brazil.
Brazil’s gambling landscape in 2026
Eighty years after Dutra’s decree, Brazil’s gambling law is a genuine patchwork rather than a single coherent system. Fixed-odds sports and online betting operate under a real licensing regime, with a dedicated regulator, meaningful fees, and KYC and payment rules that would look familiar in any mature European market. Caixa’s federal lottery draws continue as a state monopoly product dating back to the 1960s. Jogo do bicho remains a criminal misdemeanour on the books yet a visible, culturally entrenched activity in practice. And physical casinos — the industry that once made Rio de Janeiro a global gaming capital — remain formally banned, their legalisation dependent on a bill that Congress has now delayed past two consecutive legislative years.
Key dates
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 27 April 1844 | Decreto nº 357 — Dom Pedro II regulates lottery draws across the Empire |
| 3 July 1892 | Jogo do bicho created at the Vila Isabel zoo by Barão de Drummond |
| 1923 / 1933 | Copacabana Palace casino opens; Cassino da Urca opens under Joaquim Rolla |
| 3 October 1941 | Decreto-Lei 3.688 — Lei das Contravenções Penais enacted, incl. Art. 50 (jogos de azar) and Art. 58 (jogo do bicho) |
| 10 February 1944 | Decreto-Lei 6.259 — federal lottery service law, redefines jogo do bicho |
| 30 April 1946 | Decreto-Lei 9.215 — Dutra bans gambling nationwide; casinos close |
| 12 August 1969 | Decreto-Lei 759 — Caixa Econômica Federal’s lottery monopoly formalised |
| 12 December 2018 | Lei 13.756/2018 — fixed-odds betting legalised in principle |
| 29 December 2023 | Lei 14.790/2023 — full regulatory regime and SPA created |
| 1 January 2025 | Regulated fixed-odds betting market goes live |
| June 2025 | CPI das Bets final report rejected by Senate committee, 4–3 |
| 18 December 2025 | Senate rejects fast-track for PL 2.234/2022 (casinos/bingo), pushing it to 2026 |
Sources
- Decreto-Lei nº 9.215/1946 (Planalto) — official text confirming the ban’s date, four articles, and the decrees it revoked.
- Decreto-Lei 9.215/1946, article-by-article (Modelo Inicial) — full article text of the 1946 prohibition decree.
- Decreto-Lei nº 3.688/1941 (Planalto) — official text of the Lei das Contravenções Penais.
- Article 50, Lei das Contravenções Penais (Modelo Inicial) — text and paragraphs of Article 50, incl. the Lei 13.155/2015 amendment.
- Article 58, Decreto-Lei 3.688/1941 (Jusbrasil) — original criminalisation of jogo do bicho.
- Decreto-Lei nº 6.259/1944 (BNL Data) — federal lottery service law and its own Article 58 defining jogo do bicho.
- Decreto nº 357/1844 (Câmara dos Deputados legislative archive) — imperial regulation of lotteries.
- História das Loterias no Brasil (InfoEscola) — background on colonial-era lotteries and their civic funding role.
- A história da criação do jogo do bicho (Cult Carioca) — origin story: Barão de Drummond, the Vila Isabel zoo, and 3 July 1892.
- Jogo do bicho: a origem das dinastias do crime no Rio (Jornal da USP) — bicheiro dynasties, Castor de Andrade, and samba-school financing.
- “Por moral e bons costumes”, há 70 anos Dutra decretava fim dos cassinos (Senado Notícias) — Dutra’s justification, casino count, and economic impact on spa towns.
- Lei nº 13.756/2018 (Câmara dos Deputados legislative archive) — creation of apostas de quota fixa as a lottery modality.
- Lei nº 14.790/2023 (Planalto) — official text establishing the SPA and the full betting licensing regime.
- Apostas de Quota Fixa (Secretaria de Prêmios e Apostas / Ministério da Fazenda) — official regulator page confirming Portaria SPA/MF 827/2024, licensing process and the .bet.br domain rule.
- Mercado de apostas começa a funcionar plenamente regulado (Agência Gov) — 1 January 2025 go-live and initial 66 authorised operators.
- Fazenda autoriza 21 empresas (Poder360) — 11 February 2025 definitive authorisations.
- Anatel bloqueou sites de bets ilegais (Convergência Digital) — enforcement blocking figures against unauthorised operators.
- CPI das Bets rejeita relatório final (Senado Notícias) — CPI installation, leadership, report contents and its rejection.
- Bolsa Família: TCU analisa possível uso ilícito de CPFs (Tribunal de Contas da União) — official TCU findings on Bolsa Família spending on betting platforms.
- Senado aprova restrição à publicidade de bets (Senado Notícias) — PL 2.985/2023 advertising restrictions approved by the Senate.
- PL 2234/2022 (Senado Federal — official bill tracker) — current status, CCJ approval, and the December 2025 urgency-request rejection.