Brazilians Lost US$12 Billion to Betting Last Year. Congress Spent the Week on Tax Arbitration

Brazil · POLITICS

Three pieces of legislation that will change how Brazil taxes, rents and gambles — and one deadline in September that almost nobody is watching.

Brazil tax arbitration is now one signature from law, and if you run a business here it is the most useful thing Congress has done this year. The Senate approved PLP 124/2022 on 12 August without a single vote against, creating settlement, mediation and arbitration as ways out of tax and customs disputes that currently take a decade to resolve.

What Brazil tax arbitration actually does

Brazilian tax disputes are famously slow. An assessment can be contested administratively, then judicially, and the full sequence routinely takes ten years or more. Companies carry the contingency on their balance sheets for the duration, and the state collects nothing in the meantime.

The bill creates arbitration, mediation and settlement as alternatives. It applies to tax and customs disputes and is designed to close cases that would otherwise sit in a queue. It originated in the Senate, was amended by the Chamber last November, and came back for a final vote that passed 69–0.

The catch, as always, is scope. Arbitration works when both sides accept the outcome as final, and tax authorities are institutionally reluctant to accept anything less than full payment. How much this changes will depend on the rules the Revenue Service writes, not on the statute. It also still needs the president’s signature, which had not come by the end of this week.

Payroll-deducted rent is more interesting than it sounds

The Chamber approved PL 462/11 on 12 August, letting rent be deducted directly from wages, capped at 30% of available pay. The rapporteur was Cláudio Cajado. It still has to pass the Senate.

Brazil already does this for consumer credit — crédito consignado — and the effect there was dramatic: because the lender’s risk collapses, the interest rate collapses with it. The logic here is the same. A landlord with a payroll deduction faces almost no default risk, and should in principle accept a lower deposit and fewer guarantor requirements.

Those requirements are the real barrier to renting in Brazil. The standard alternative is a fiador — a guarantor who owns property outright — or an insurance product costing a month’s rent a year. For anyone without family property to draw on, including most foreign residents, that is the obstacle.

The risk runs the other way too. A deduction that takes rent before the worker sees the money removes their leverage in a dispute with a landlord who is not maintaining the property.

The deadline nobody is talking about

The Revenue Service has until 14 September 2026 to send the federal audit court its calculation of the reference CBS rate for 2027, along with the reducer applied to government purchases.

This is the number that determines what Brazil’s new consumption tax actually costs. The reform passed with the rate deliberately left to be calculated later, and estimates have ranged from the government’s own projections to considerably higher figures from private economists.

For any business operating in Brazil, this is the most consequential date in the current legislative calendar, and it is arriving with almost no public attention.

It is worth understanding why the number was left blank. Brazil’s consumption-tax reform replaced a thicket of federal, state and municipal levies with two new taxes, and the political price of passing it was agreeing not to argue about the rate at the same time. That argument is now due. A reference rate at the top of the estimated range would make Brazil one of the most heavily consumption-taxed countries in the world; one at the bottom would leave a hole somebody has to fill.

And then there is the betting figure

Comsefaz, the body representing state finance secretaries, published a study with the Centro Internacional Celso Furtado on 6 August estimating that Brazilian households lost R$62.5 billion to online betting in 2025 — roughly US$12 billion, or about 0.68% of gross household disposable income.

Keep the two numbers apart, because they get conflated. R$350.97 billion — about US$67.5 billion — moved through payment systems into betting; R$62.5 billion, roughly US$12 billion, is what did not come back. That second figure is about 40% of the R$158 billion, some US$30.4 billion, budgeted for Bolsa Família this year, and it is concentrated among lower-income households, which is where both the political and the fiscal damage lands.

The regulatory response has been running behind it. The Finance Ministry suspended fourteen betting sites on 19 August. Earlier in the month it signalled rules that would impose a five-second interval between bets and ban auto-betting, coin-drop sound effects and countdown timers — measures aimed squarely at interface design, and not yet in force. And federal police investigating Operação Arena have identified 549 tax IDs belonging to dead people in currency operations linked to the betting firm Pixbet. That is an open investigation, not a charge.

The uncomfortable arithmetic for the government is that betting is also a tax base. Having legalised and taxed the sector, the state now has a revenue interest in an activity draining twelve billion dollars a year from the households it also subsidises.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Brazil tax arbitration now law?

Not quite. The Senate gave PLP 124/2022 final approval on 12 August 2026 by 69 votes to none, and it awaits presidential sanction. It creates settlement, mediation and special arbitration for tax and customs disputes.

Can Brazilian landlords deduct rent from wages?

Not yet. The Chamber approved PL 462/11 on 12 August 2026, capping deductions at 30% of available pay, and it now goes to the Senate.

How much did Brazilians lose to betting in 2025?

R$62.5 billion, about US$12 billion, according to a study by Comsefaz and the Centro Internacional Celso Furtado published on 6 August 2026. That is net losses; R$350.97 billion, about US$67.5 billion, was moved through payment systems in total.

Sources: Senado Federal; Câmara dos Deputados; Tribunal de Contas da União; Comsefaz and Centro Internacional Celso Furtado; Ministério da Fazenda; Polícia Federal.

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