Durigan says no decision has been made regarding bets.
Finance Minister Dario Durigan said on Thursday (17) that the government has not yet made any decision on a more radical ban or restriction on betting in the country, and that all debate on measures for the sector has been going through the discussion of the cost of living for Brazilian families.
"So, no decision has been made yet. When a decision is made, we will announce it, but what I am saying is that we remain very concerned about the cost of living and preserving the income of Brazilian families," the minister declared in an interview reproduced by the mainstream press.
Durigan cited the government's efforts to curb rising fuel prices as a reference, placing the bets on the same level of concern about family income.
"While we still see R$ 62 billion leaving families for loans, people are not comfortable and we continue working to reduce the impact on families' income," added the minister, according to whom the government is working to reduce this impact on household budgets.
GGR is mistaken.
The R$62 billion figure cited by the minister does not correspond to the sector's GGR (Gross Gaming Revenue) — that is, the revenue that betting houses actually retain after prizes are paid to bettors and which is used to calculate the amounts allocated to legal beneficiaries. Instead, it comes closer to an interpretation that mixes or overestimates the volume of deposits and the turnover wagered, categories that are much larger and conceptually distinct from the sector's net income.
According to reports from the Ministry of Finance's own Prize and Betting Secretariat (SPA/MF) released in January 2026 and data obtained exclusively by BNLData via the Access to Information Law (LAI):
⇒ 2025 Gross Revenue (full year): R$ 36,9 billion — resulting from R$ 220,6 billion deposited by bettors, of which R$ 183,7 billion returned in the form of prizes and withdrawable bonuses.
⇒ Gross Guaranteed Value (GGR) for the first half of 2026: R$ 20,07 billion, a 15,3% increase over the same period in 2025. In those six months, the total turnover wagered amounted to R$ 410,85 billion, of which R$ 377,86 billion returned to bettors in prizes — a return to bettor (RTP) rate of 92,2%.
In other words: in no official data available — neither the full year of 2025, nor the first half of 2026 — does the sector's GGR come close to the R$ 62 billion mentioned by the minister. Adding the GGR of 2025 to that of the first half of 2026, the total is still around R$ 57 billion, and even this sum mixes two different periods, which technically is not a valid comparison.
A recurring problem: conceptual confusion.
This is not an isolated error. BNLData has previously pointed out similar cases of confusion between GGR and other industry indicators, including:
⇒ A report by Bradesco BBI, which was reported in the press, overestimated the GGR (Gross Guaranteed Reward) of bets in Brazil by approximately 2,5 times.
⇒ A flawed comparison between R$ 37 billion in "betting losses" (actually, GGR) and R$ 31 billion in income tax exemptions, which treated two economic universes of different sizes and compositions as equivalent.
Editor's Note
The Minister of Finance should consult his own Ministry of Prizes and Betting Secretariat about the actual amounts of money moved by the regulated sector before citing figures in high-profile interviews. This has been one of the main problems in the public debate about betting in Brazil: the lack of transparency—and, in this case, conceptual precision even within the government itself—in the disclosure of sector revenue data, which opens the door for erroneous estimates to contaminate and distort the discussion on public policies for the area.
