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Brazil’s federal gambling authority will kick off an initiative to directly regulate online gambling suppliers later this year, as part of a broader rulemaking agenda running through the end of 2026.
The Secretariat for Prizes and Bets (SPA) published its formal 2025/26 regulatory agenda on Wednesday (April 16), some two months after a draft version was released for public consultation.
As part of the agenda, the SPA has confirmed that it will proceed with regulating the relationship between newly-licensed online betting operators and their key suppliers, with further details of the initiative due to be published at the end of the third-quarter of 2025.
The published rulemaking agenda does not specify whether the regulation of suppliers will lead to a licensing or registration system, but it is expected to involve “an assessment of ways for qualifying suppliers, with specific rules for monitoring and inspection as well as the eventual termination of use”.
The SPA expects to regulate at least five types of suppliers, namely providers and aggregators of online casino games, platform providers, odds providers, and operators of live casino studios and live gaming equipment.
The regulation of suppliers is expected to “contribute to greater effectiveness of national regulations and greater responsiveness of the various companies, as well as serve as a tool to combat illegality”, according to the SPA’s agenda.
The regulator’s full 2025/26 agenda involves 13 specific projects and is consistent with the draft version that was opened for a five-week consultation on February 10.
One initiative no longer included in the agenda, however, is the draft plan for the SPA to establish specific regulations for live casino games so that equipment can be imported into Brazil and studios established within the country.
Under its draft agenda from February, the regulator said it planned to move forward with that initiative as soon as the second quarter of this year. In a statement announcing the final version, the SPA suggested that rules for live casino equipment would instead be combined with the broader initiative on suppliers.
The SPA said it had received around 200 responses to the consultation on its draft agenda and decided to consolidate two initiatives and alter the timeline for two others.
Going forward, the regulator said that draft rules to implement the initiatives would be published at the end of each quarter through the end of 2026, starting with June 30 of this year, and each of them will involve a “public participation process”, including further public consultations or other forums allowed under Brazilian law.
National Betting System
The three most immediate regulatory initiatives due to kick off at the end of June are proposals to develop a central database of self-excluded and prohibited bettors to be accessible by all licensed operators, to improve the process of allocating portions of sports-betting revenues to sports leagues and teams in accordance with Brazilian law, and create an official regulatory seal to help players identify licensed sites.
Other initiatives planned for 2025 and 2026 include:
- Reviewing processes for the licensing (Q1 2026), oversight (Q1 2026) and sanctioning (Q4 2026) of operators of online betting
- Enhancing rules and implementing best practices to govern how operators interact with potential problem gamblers (Q2 2025)
- Reviewing regulations applicable to so-called Lotex instant lottery games as well as for commercial promotions or sweepstakes (Q3 2025)
- Revising requirements applicable to independent testing labs approved to certify games and platforms for the Brazilian market, including a possible requirement for registered certification bodies to have an office in Brazil (Q2 2026)
In the fourth quarter of this year, the SPA also intends to formally establish a National System for Betting in order to better align federal rules with those of Brazilian state governments.
In accordance with a 2020 Federal Supreme Court (STF) ruling, Brazil’s 27 states have equal authority to operate or regulate fixed-odds betting within their jurisdictions as the federal government and at least four states have already established their own local licensing regimes.
The SPA intends for the national system to include the “dissemination of best practices and national minimum standards for responsible gaming, technical requirements for systems and games, and anti-money laundering”.
The regulator held a preliminary meeting in early April to discuss the formation of a national system that was attended by representatives from 15 states including Rio de Janeiro, Paraná and Minas Gerais.
Conspicuous by their absence were representatives of Brazilian municipal governments that are also moving forward with regulating lottery games including fixed-odds betting.
The stated position of Brazil’s federal government is that the 2020 STF ruling did not extend states’ authority to regulate lotteries to municipalities, with one legal case related to the issue currently pending before the Supreme Court.
