Brazil's Unpublished Q1 Betting Report Counts 15.2 Million Bettors and R$914 Million in Earmarks

A Finance Ministry report on the first quarter of 2026, never released by the government and obtained by BNLData through a records request, shows what the licensed market Brazil has just closed was paying out and who it could see. Its own figures carry inconsistencies the ministry says it is still checking.

• The Secretariat of Prizes and Betting (SPA) counted 15,186,243 taxpayer numbers (CPFs) that placed a bet in Brazil's licensed market between 1 January and 31 March 2026, with 97.9 million active accounts at operators and 113.3 million at brands, according to its quarterly panorama
• Operators paid R$914.1 million, approximately $176 million, in the 12% of revenue the law earmarks, of which sport received R$329.1 million, tourism R$256.0 million and the Health Ministry R$9.1 million, the 1% the law sets
• The government did not publish the report; BNLData obtained it as an attachment to a records-request reply and released it on 8 October, two days after the licensed sites went dark
• It describes harm-prevention and match-fixing working groups and ten cooperation agreements, much of it built around the licensed market that Provisional Measure 1.394 has closed
• The document needs care: it gives two different revenue totals, implies March revenue less than half January's, and the SPA told BNLData its database was still being verified

A Quarterly Panorama the Ministry Finished but Did Not Release

The SPA's "Panorama Periódico do mercado regulado de apostas de quota fixa" is a 20-page slide report built from data operators reported through Sigap, the betting management system. BNLData, a Brazilian outlet that covers lotteries and betting and carries operator advertising, says it received it as an attachment to the reply to an Access to Information Law (LAI) request registered on 27 June and answered on 30 July. Its data pages carry the footer "Not for Public Consumption or Distribution".

BNLData reads the cover code, MF-SPA-SMF-RP-26-01-260507, and the file name it was sent as showing the report was finished on 7 May; the PDF it published was generated on 11 June, according to the file's properties. The SPA's public presentations page lists panoramas for 2025 and none for 2026. According to BNLData, the reply did not explain why the report was held back, saying only that the Sigap database was being verified, and said the SPA had not recently carried out studies projecting the sector's revenue, echoing the reply on impact studies reported on 29 September.

Who Bet, and Where the Money Went

Men made up 68.01% of bettors and the largest age group was 31 to 40, at 28.85%, with 21.66% aged 24 or under. Of the 15.2 million, 44.36% bet with only one operator and 27.78% with four or more. The SPA's published 2025 panorama counted 25,245,319 bettors over the full year, with 48.0% using one operator and 24.5% four or more.

Gross gaming revenue (GGR) for the quarter was R$7.61 billion, approximately $1.47 billion. The earmarks, R$914,137,288.80, follow Article 30 of Law 13.756 as amended by the 2023 betting law, Law 14.790: 36% to sport, 28% to tourism, 13.6% to public security, 10% each to education and social security, and 1% to the Health Ministry, R$9.13 million, for measures to prevent, control and mitigate gambling harm. Sport received 36 times the health allocation and tourism 28 times, as BNLData points out. In 2025 the earmarks totalled R$4.53 billion, approximately $873 million, on GGR of R$36.96 billion, with R$45.8 million to health, according to the SPA's annual panorama.

The report lists 78 supervisory proceedings covering 60 operators and 101 brands, 50 sanctioning proceedings, 366 proceedings against digital influencers and 23,462 URLs blocked between October 2024 and October 2025. Its responsible-gambling section describes a working group of the Finance, Health and Sport ministries and the communications secretariat, whose plan includes the centralised self-exclusion platform, a health self-test, a care protocol and training for mental-health services; a match-fixing group; and ten cooperation agreements with bodies including Sportradar, IBIA, the telecoms regulator Anatel and the advertising self-regulator CONAR. Unlike the 2025 panorama, which put self-exclusions at more than 217,000, it gives no self-exclusion count.

BNLData calls the report "the official portrait" of what the measure dismantled. It projects about R$3.6 billion a year in earmarks at the first-quarter rate, cites H1 GGR of R$20.07 billion, approximately $3.87 billion, from a separate LAI request, and argues the 1% health share was never changed by a government that now cites bettors' health.

The Health Earmark Shows How the Law Was Written, Not the Whole Health Response

R$9.1 million in a quarter is small against the R$38.8 billion annual social cost the government cited when it banned betting, and BNLData's point has force: the 1% was fixed in a law President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed in December 2023 and was not revisited before the ban. But the earmark is one funding line, not the state's health budget, and the market also paid taxes that Receita Federal put at R$9.91 billion in the first eight months of this year. The split is evidence of priorities when the market was designed, not proof the harm concern is insincere.

Fifteen Million Identified Bettors Are What a Ban Cannot Carry Over

The strongest reading of the report is through channelisation. Each of those 15.2 million bettors was tied to a CPF, a bank account and, from December, a central self-exclusion register that passed 1.2 million requests by September. The working group's plans assume that register exists. Whoever keeps betting after the ban does so outside it, and the 27.78% who already spread their play across four or more operators look the most practised at moving. The report does not measure the illegal market, and nobody yet knows how many bettors will stop rather than migrate; the government did not study that question before acting.

The Report Is Weaker Evidence Than Either Side Will Want

The document's flaws cut both ways. Its two GGR totals differ by R$100,000. Its cumulative monthly bars imply R$3.78 billion in January, R$2.37 billion in February and R$1.46 billion in March, which it does not explain, against an average of R$9.24 billion a quarter in 2025; BNLData's H1 figure would put the second quarter near R$12.5 billion. Its supervision-fee chart runs from January to September, not the quarter. If March was incomplete, BNLData's annual projection understates the loss, and the published 2025 total of R$4.53 billion is the firmer guide to what earmarked beneficiaries stand to lose each year.

The government's own data describe a market it could see, count and tax, with harm-prevention tools only beginning to work. Whether the ban reduces that harm or relocates it is a question the ministry did not study before acting, and the report it kept back does not answer it.