Federal fixed-odds betting in Brazil ended on a clock, not on a negotiation. On 25 September 2026 the government published Medida Provisória nº 1.394, which prohibits the exploitation, offering, intermediation and advertising of fixed-odds betting lotteries in Brazilian territory, including when the operator is based abroad and offers the product to a person located in Brazil. The instrument took effect on publication, and the obligations it creates are already running.
For a game supplier, a platform or an aggregator, the headline is the least useful part of the text. What matters is the schedule the operator has to meet, the money that has to go back, the data that has to keep flowing, and — the part that survives everything else — the contractual question of who carries the cost of a market that closed with work still in flight.
This article reads MP 1.394/2026 as a set of duties. It is not the general certification submission guide, which is about getting a title through a laboratory; it is not the platform commissioning guide, which is about who owns an exclusive; and it is not the studio commissioning checks, which are about the supplier contract itself. It is what the closure now requires of the people who were already supplied.
The prohibition covers online game events, not only sport
The scope question is answered in the first two articles of the text, and the answer is broader than the phrase “apostas esportivas” suggests. Article 1 prohibits exploitation, offering, intermediation and advertising of fixed-odds betting lotteries “em meio físico ou virtual”, and its first paragraph states expressly that the prohibition “abrange as apostas sobre eventos reais de temática esportiva e sobre eventos virtuais de jogos on-line” — real sporting events and virtual online game events.
The definitions in article 3 turn that into a product boundary. A fixed-odds bet is an act by which a value is put at risk in the expectation of a prize whose amount is defined by a multiplication factor. A jogo on-line is an electronic channel for a virtual bet on a game whose result is decided by a future random outcome, from a random generator of numbers, symbols, figures or objects defined in its rules system; an evento virtual de jogo on-line is an event, competition or act of an online game whose result is unknown at the moment of the bet. A catalogue of slots, crash titles, table games and live-dealer products offered as fixed-odds bets sits inside that language.
Two limits are equally explicit. Article 1’s second paragraph keeps other lottery modalities authorised by law outside the prohibition, and article 2 extends the measure, and the wind-down duties with it, to fixed-odds authorisations granted by states and the Federal District, which are extinguished on the same timetable as the federal ones.
The takedown clock ran in days, not quarters
Article 7 required operators, ten days after publication of the measure, to make the websites and internet applications used to offer fixed-odds betting inaccessible, including in application stores, under penalty of blocking. Publication was on 25 September; the government’s own account of the calendar put the national block of sites and applications at midnight on 6 October, after the window for bettors to withdraw remaining balances closed at 23:59 on 5 October, with Anatel, CGI.br and the app stores involved in enforcement.
Three details in the same article decide what a supplier sees downstream:
- No new money in. From publication, article 7 §1 forbids new funds entering the operators’ transactional accounts, with a narrow exception for amounts proven to come from the redemption, maturity, disposal or settlement of financial assets in which players’ funds were already invested.
- Open bets became void. Bets open when the period ended whose result had not been settled are treated as having no effect, with full restitution of the amounts staked and no deductions of any kind (article 7 §2).
- Settled bets still paid. Winnings on bets whose result was settled within the period remain payable to the bettor (article 7 §3).
That combination — an abrupt cut-off, void open bets and a refund duty — is what turns a launch calendar into a finance and operations problem rather than a content problem.
Restitution is a sequenced duty, and it is fined
The refund is not left to goodwill or to a support queue. Article 8 requires the operator, within two days of the takedown, to ensure the availability and liquidity of the funds needed for full restitution of everything owed — available balances, the amounts corresponding to bets treated as void, and prizes due — and to send both the financial and payment institutions holding its transactional accounts and the Secretaria de Prêmios e Apostas (SPA) an itemised list of bettors with CPF number, amounts to be returned and source accounts, with proof of the funds’ availability.
The same article keeps those funds segregated from the operator’s own patrimony and forbid moving them for any purpose other than paying bettors, and sets the price of slippage: a daily fine of R$ 200,000 until the obligation is met, without prejudice to other sanctions. Payment institutions then have seven days from receiving the list to refund in full, preferably to the account of origin, to report to the SPA what was and was not refunded and why, and to transfer anything unrefundable into a dedicated account at Caixa Econômica Federal (article 9). Its fourth paragraph is the one to read twice: restitution does not discharge the operator’s liability for values not made available, for differences found, or for other obligations from the activity.
The authorisation ends; the reporting and the records do not
Article 4 extinguishes the authorisations granted under Lei nº 14.790/2023 thirty days after publication, and adds that the extinction is for reasons of public interest — conferring no right to the return of the outorga paid under article 12 of that law, and no compensation. Article 6 stops the pipeline at the other end: no new grants, permissions or authorisations, and undecided applications are prejudiced.
What does not end is the paper trail. Article 10 states that extinction or closure does not remove the operator’s obligations for the period in which it was authorised, naming four: regulatory, tax and pecuniary obligations including legal destinations; anti-money-laundering, terrorist-financing and proliferation-financing duties together with responsible gaming and sports integrity; providing authorities with the information they need to supervise; and keeping data, documents and records — including those on bettors, bets, financial operations and prize payments — complete and accessible to authorities for at least five years. Article 11 keeps the operator feeding the Sistema de Gestão de Apostas (SIGAP) with data on bettors, bets, prizes, deposits, withdrawals and transactional accounts, remaining balances and refunds, revenue and legal destinations, and the measures taken to promote responsible gaming and player protection. Breach falls under the sanctions regime of article 41 of Lei 14.790 (article 12); article 13 suspends sanction proceedings not finally decided and archives them where the operator meets the wind-down obligations in time.
For a supplier, that is the practical instruction: the responsible-gaming and integrity evidence a studio and a platform helped generate does not become irrelevant because the market closed. It becomes the operator’s five-year record.
Advertising, sponsorship and the line the text draws
Article 16 prohibits communication, advertising, propaganda, marketing and sponsorship actions relating to fixed-odds betting in Brazilian territory, in any medium, physical or digital. Its first paragraph is deliberately wide: the ban reaches any content that offers, promotes, divulges or facilitates access to fixed-odds betting and is directed at the Brazilian public, whatever the format or the form of remuneration. Material already in the field had to be withdrawn within ten days of publication (article 16 §2).
Article 17 carves out one exception — content published before the measure that carried commercial betting advertising only incidentally to that content. Article 18 then classifies an infringement of articles 16 and 17 as abusive advertising under article 37 §2 of the Consumer Defence Code, exposing the infringer to the sanctions of article 56 of that Code, including counter-advertising, alongside civil and criminal liability. Articles 19 to 22 put a duty of care on internet application providers, require app stores and operating systems to prevent the availability of prohibited products, and set sanctions that scale from a warning to fines of up to 10% of the economic group’s Brazilian turnover or R$ 10 to R$ 1,000 per registered user, capped at R$ 50 million per infraction, with a local branch jointly liable for a foreign company’s fine.
Nothing in that section is aimed at an editorial article about the law, and nothing in it excuses a supplier’s own channels being left switched on. A campaign, a sponsored stream or a promotional landing page that points at a product now outside the law is the exposure, and the ten-day removal duty applied to sponsors and suppliers as much as to the operator whose brand carried it.
What it means for the games that were mid-flight
A game is not a website, so it does not go dark on a takedown clock — but it stops having anyone authorised to offer it. That is a strange state for an asset, and it is worth naming precisely, because the work in flight was not decoration.
Under the regime the measure displaces, an online game offered in Brazil had to be certified by a laboratory whose operational capacity the SPA had recognised, on certificates issued specifically for Brazil, and those certificates had to be revalidated whenever a critical component was included, altered or removed, with the revalidated certificate submitted through SIGAP within five business days. Integration had to be certified per game type, and clone titles — the same mathematics under a different skin — needed their own conformity evidence rather than a reference to the original. That is the shape of the work the certification submission guide describes, and it was commissioned for a market that, for now, has no operators to receive it.
The revocation list in article 29 is the reason the point is not merely commercial. It removes Chapter V of Lei nº 13.756/2018 and most of Lei nº 14.790/2023, while the same article’s sole paragraph keeps those provisions applicable to facts that occurred during the validity of the authorisations and to the duties in the wind-down chapters. So the certification and reporting evidence already produced stays relevant to the operator’s record, and the studio or platform that holds build identities, mathematics and test packages is the party that can produce it.
The decision this creates is a contract decision, and it was already latent in the branded commissioning brief and the platform exclusive arrangement: where a market can end by instrument, the commission should say what happens when it does. Four clauses do most of the work — a market-suspension event that starts the clock on deliverables and payment; a named accommodation for certification cost already sunk against a market that closed; an exclusivity window that does not begin to run over a market with no lawful distribution; and a records clause that keeps the mathematics, rules artefacts and certification package available to the operator for as long as its own retention duty runs.
It is a medida provisória, and that is a fact to price
Article 30 brings the measure into force on publication. A medida provisória is nonetheless provisional legislation: it must be considered by the National Congress within sixty days, extendable by a further sixty, and amendments had already been tabled in the days after publication. The prohibition binds today; how long the regime lasts is a question for the legislature, not for a supplier’s roadmap.
The operating consequence is symmetrical. A supplier should not plan on the measure lapsing, because the duties it created are owed now, and a supplier should not plan on the pre-existing regime returning in exactly the form it had, because that regime is what the measure revoked. Contracts and roadmaps that assume either outcome are the ones that will be reopened.
The decisions that belong on one page
The instrument is long, but the list an operator and its suppliers should be able to point at is short:
- Takedown evidence. What proves the sites and applications were made inaccessible, and on what date.
- The refund runbook. The two-day operator duty and the seven-day payment-institution duty, the segregation rule, and the daily fine that starts if either slips.
- Records and reporting. Five years of data at the operator’s side, SIGAP transmission continuing, and the responsible-gaming and integrity evidence handed over rather than archived.
- Advertising removal. Ten days, the accessory-content exception checked rather than assumed, and every supplier-owned channel included in the sweep.
- The contract read. Suspension, sunk certification cost, exclusivity timing and records — settled while the market is closed rather than while it is reopening.
- The wind-down date. Thirty days for the authorisation, and no return of the outorga for it.
The certification and compliance conversation is where a supplier’s own evidence set — build identities, mathematics, rules artefacts and the certification package behind them — is put in a state that survives a market ending, and where the studio and platform partner side of a commission is re-read against the markets it actually serves. It is best held while the market is closed, not while it is being reopened.
Questions operators and suppliers ask
Does the prohibition cover online casino games, or only sports betting?
Both. Article 1 §1 of MP 1.394/2026 states that the prohibition covers bets on real sporting events and on virtual online game events. Article 3 defines an online game as an electronic channel for a virtual bet whose result is decided by a random generator defined in the game’s rules system, and a virtual online game event as an event or act of that game whose result is unknown when the bet is placed. Other lottery modalities authorised by law are not caught by the prohibition (article 1 §2).
What was the deadline for taking betting sites and applications offline?
Ten days after publication. Article 7 required operators to make the websites and internet applications used to offer fixed-odds betting inaccessible, including in application stores, under penalty of blocking; the measure was published on 25 September 2026, and the government described the national block of sites and applications as taking effect at the start of 6 October, after the balance-withdrawal window closed on 5 October at 23:59.
Do player balances still have to be returned after the market closes?
Yes, and on a sequence. Bets open when the takedown period ended with no settled result are treated as having no effect and are refunded in full with no deductions (article 7 §2), while settled bets still pay their winnings (article 7 §3). Article 8 gives the operator two days from the takedown to make the funds available and liquid, segregate them and send the itemised list of bettors to its banks and payment institutions and to the SPA, with a daily fine of R$ 200,000 for delay; article 9 gives those institutions seven days from receiving the list to refund in full, report and hand unrefundable amounts to a dedicated Caixa account.
What happens to a game that was already certified for Brazil?
The certificate answered a market that currently has no authorised operators to receive it, and article 29 revokes the provisions the regime rested on — Chapter V of Lei nº 13.756/2018 and most of Lei nº 14.790/2023. Its sole paragraph keeps those provisions applicable to facts that occurred while the authorisations were valid and to the duties set out in the wind-down chapters, and article 10 requires the operator to keep records, documents and data accessible to the authorities for at least five years. The practical effect is that the mathematics, rules artefacts and certification package stay relevant as evidence, which is a reason to keep them organised rather than a reason to retire them.
Is the prohibition permanent?
MP 1.394/2026 is in force from its publication on 25 September 2026 (article 30), so it binds now. As a medida provisória it must be considered by the National Congress within sixty days, a period extendable by a further sixty, and amendments had been tabled within days of publication. None of the duties described above depends on how that consideration ends: they are owed under the text as published, and a supplier that prices its Brazilian work on the assumption that the regime will return is making a commercial bet rather than reading the instrument.
