R$ 691. That is the new minimum payment of the Bolsa Familia, Brazil's largest cash-transfer program, after President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva announced a 15.04% increase on Thursday (17) at the Planalto Palace in Brasilia. For a household on the minimum, it means 91 reais more per month.
The average payment rises from 675 to 777 reais, a gain of 102 reais. About 19.3 million households were paid in August, according to government figures. The government has not yet said when the new values start being paid.
Understand: the 15.04% comes from the INPC, Brazil's consumer price index for low-income households and the reference used to adjust the program. Planning Minister Bruno Moretti said the index accumulated exactly that much from the program's relaunch in March 2023 through August. In practice, the new 691 reais buy what 600 reais bought in 2023.
Who qualifies and what else changes
Families qualify with monthly income of up to 218 reais per person, an updated registration in the Cadastro Unico database, and school and health commitments. Extra payments stack on top of the floor, as listed below. The government has not detailed how these add-ons will be adjusted.
- R$ 150 per child up to 6 years old
- R$ 50 per pregnant woman
- R$ 50 per youth from 7 to 17 years old
- R$ 50 per baby up to 6 months old
The cost and the election clock
The raise was enacted by presidential decree and needs no vote in Congress, InfoMoney reported. Moretti put the cost at 5.8 billion reais for the rest of 2026 and around 22 billion reais in 2027, the first full year, nearly four times this year's bill. In the 2027 budget bill, which was sent to Congress without the increase, the program's allocation goes from 157.1 billion to about 179 billion reais, according to g1.
Finance Minister Dario Durigan said the government's fiscal targets stay unchanged:
"We are doing this in a very responsible way, very different from what the country has seen at other times... There is no jolt, there is no change of course."
The announcement came less than 20 days before the first round of the presidential election on October 4, in which Lula is running for reelection. The 600-real floor had been in place since 2022, when it was set by then president Jair Bolsonaro, also on the eve of an election, as Folha de S.Paulo noted. It is the first adjustment since the program's relaunch in 2023; the law allows corrections at intervals of up to two years but does not make them mandatory, g1 reported.