How Brazil's fixed-odds betting licensing works

The legal framework

Law No. 14,790/2023 established the framework for regulating fixed-odds betting, both online and land-based, in Brazil, with the Secretaria de Prêmios e Apostas (SPA), under the Ministry of Finance, as the licensing body.

Operators seeking to operate legally in the country must obtain SPA authorisation and meet technology, advertising and player-protection requirements. The SPA publishes an official, regularly updated list of authorised companies.

For bettors, the practical upshot of this framework is straightforward even if the underlying law isn't: a company appearing on the SPA's published list has gone through a formal authorisation process with real requirements attached to it, while a company that doesn't appear there hasn't, regardless of how established or popular the brand might look from the outside.

From Law 13,756/2018 to Law 14,790/2023: a long transition

Today's regulatory framework didn't appear out of nowhere. Law No. 13,756/2018 had already authorised fixed-odds betting in Brazil in principle, but left the detailed regulation (how to license operators, how to tax the activity, how to protect players) to later complementary legislation and rules. Over the following years, the Brazilian market operated in what specialist press repeatedly described as a grey zone: betting wasn't criminalised for consumers, but no clear licensing regime existed for operators either, which led dozens of international brands to serve Brazilian bettors with no formal oversight from the Brazilian state.

Law No. 14,790/2023 closed that gap, finally creating a complete licensing regime. The shift from an unregulated market to a licensed one didn't happen overnight: it involved the SPA publishing complementary portarias (regulatory orders) and rules over several months, spelling out technical, financial, and compliance requirements that the law's main text only sketched out in general terms.

The SPA's role and the authorisation process

The Secretaria de Prêmios e Apostas, created within the Ministry of Finance's structure, is the body responsible for granting, supervising and, where necessary, suspending or cancelling fixed-odds betting operators' authorisations in Brazil. The authorisation process requires, among other things, detailed corporate documentation, proof of financial capacity, and payment of a federal authorisation fee (publicly reported to be in the region of thirty million reais), valid for a period of several years and able to cover multiple brands under the same corporate group.

This high authorisation fee functions, in practice, as a significant barrier to entry, deliberately designed to filter out operators without the real financial capacity to meet the regulatory and player-protection obligations required throughout the licensing period, not just at the moment of the initial application.

Technical and compliance requirements

Beyond financial capacity, authorised operators need to demonstrate technical compliance: betting systems certified by independent testing bodies, infrastructure capable of supporting real-time audit by the SPA, and technical fraud- and money-laundering-prevention mechanisms built into the platform itself, not just described in compliance paperwork.

These technical requirements carry a real implementation cost, on top of the authorisation fee already mentioned, which is part of why the Brazilian licensing process is described, by industry analysts, as one of the most demanding in Latin America in terms of combined financial and technical barrier to entry.

Player protection: baseline requirements

Law 14,790/2023 and the SPA's complementary rules require licensed operators to offer responsible-gambling tools directly on the platform itself: deposit limits, self-exclusion, and identity verification robust enough to prevent, as far as reasonably possible, access by minors. These requirements aren't optional or left to each operator's discretion; they're part of the baseline licensing conditions.

The identity verification (KYC) Brazilian regulation requires simultaneously serves fraud prevention, money-laundering prevention, and player protection; all three goals converge in the same technical process of confirming who is actually behind each betting account, a subject covered in more detail in the KYC guide.

Advertising and marketing under tighter rules

Advertising for fixed-odds betting in Brazil became subject to specific rules following Law 14,790/2023, including a requirement for responsible-gambling messaging in advertising campaigns, restrictions on the target audience for certain messages, and blanket bans on advertising that promises guaranteed winnings or downplays the financial risks of betting.

These advertising rules continue to be fine-tuned through complementary rules published by the SPA and, in some cases, by other regulatory bodies with authority over advertising and consumer protection. The advertising framework remains, as a result, an active area of regulatory development, rather than a fully fixed set of rules since the law took effect.

The tax burden and where the revenue goes

Licensed operators pay a federal tax on gross gaming revenue (GGR, the amount wagered minus prizes paid out), widely reported at 12%, on top of the other usual tax obligations of any company operating in Brazil. Part of this betting-specific tax revenue is, under the legal framework, directed toward areas including sport, tourism, public security, education, and social security.

This taxation model follows a pattern common to other recently regulated betting markets around the world, where part of the political justification for regulation is precisely capturing tax revenue from an activity that, for years, generated revenue for international operators with no formal fiscal return for the Brazilian state.

The transition deadline, and what changed for bettors

Implementing Law 14,790/2023 included a transition period during which operators already serving Brazilian bettors, even without a formal licence, could regularise their situation with the SPA before stricter blocking measures against unauthorised platforms were enforced. After that transition period, the SPA and other competent bodies stepped up efforts to restrict access to operators that chose not to seek a licence.

For the average bettor, this shift had a concrete practical effect: the number of brands operating visibly under licence, with their authorisation number published directly on the operator's own page, increased significantly compared with the period before the law, making it easier (though still not automatic) to tell licensed operators apart from ones still operating outside Brazil's regulatory framework.

How to check whether an operator is genuinely licensed

The most reliable way to confirm an operator's licensing status is checking directly against the official list the SPA publishes, updated regularly as new authorisations are granted, suspended, or cancelled. Don't just trust a seal or logo shown on the operator's own page alone, which can be outdated or, in rarer cases, simply fake.

Genuinely licensed operators typically publish their authorisation number visibly, usually in the site's footer or on a page dedicated to regulatory information. Cross-checking that number against the SPA's official list is the final step that most reliably confirms the authorisation is real and currently in force, not just claimed.

Ongoing supervision: what happens after authorisation

Authorisation granted by the SPA isn't a permanent, unchangeable stamp: licensed operators remain subject to ongoing supervision throughout the entire validity period of the authorisation, including technical and financial audits, regular reporting obligations, and the possibility of sanctions ranging from formal warnings to suspension or cancellation of the authorisation in cases of serious or repeated non-compliance.

This model of continuous supervision, rather than a single check at the moment of licensing, reflects a regulatory approach common to mature betting markets elsewhere in the world, where experience has shown that initial compliance at the time of application doesn't, on its own, guarantee continued compliance across years of operation.

A regulatory framework still under development

Even though Law 14,790/2023 established the main structure of Brazilian licensing, complementary rules continue to be published by the SPA to spell out specific aspects (from more granular technical requirements to adjustments in advertising rules) as the regulated market itself matures and practical situations emerge that weren't fully anticipated in the law's initial design.

For operators, industry journalists, and bettors interested in following this evolution, the SPA's own site remains the most reliable primary source (more so than any secondary summary, including this article), precisely because complementary rules can be published or updated between one review of this kind of explainer content and the next.

Why this framework matters beyond legal compliance

Discussing licensing can seem, at first glance, like a purely bureaucratic matter, far removed from what actually matters to a bettor. But the framework established by Law 14,790/2023 is precisely what determines, in practice, whether any formal recourse exists if something goes wrong: an unprocessed withdrawal, a bonus not honoured according to its published terms, or a dispute over a specific bet's outcome.

A licensed operator is subject to SPA supervision and, ultimately, to formal dispute-resolution mechanisms tied to Brazil's regulatory system. An unlicensed operator, even if technically accessible from Brazil, sits outside that system: that means any dispute is, in practice, subject only to that company's own terms and unilateral goodwill, with no Brazilian authority holding any formal power to step in on the bettor's behalf if things go wrong, no matter how legitimate the underlying complaint might actually turn out to be.

That distinction, more than any marketing claim on a homepage, is what a real licence actually buys a bettor. It's worth remembering every time a slick landing page tries to substitute polished design for that substance, since a convincing interface is precisely how most people end up signing up on an unlicensed platform without ever really meaning to, and long before any dispute ever comes along and gives them a genuinely good, concrete reason to actually stop and look into any of it more closely than that. Checking the SPA's list first takes only a couple of minutes, and it's a couple of minutes far better spent before signing up than after a withdrawal has already gone wrong.