How Many Sugar Daddies Are There in Brazil?

In recent years, Brazilian news has talked a lot about the "sugar world": millions of sugar babies, hundreds of thousands of sugar daddies, and Brasília as one of the cities with the most high-income providers. These numbers draw attention.

The figures usually come from the platforms themselves, based on their sign-up databases. To get another point of reference, we ran an independent estimate using public data, trying to answer a simple question: how many men in Brazil would have the income and willingness to be sugar daddies?

What the platforms report

One sugar platform reports more than 18 million registered users in Latin America and more than 10 million sugar babies in Brazil alone. Another mentions about 619,000 sugar daddies in the country, 136,000 of them in Brasília.

The published data also includes income details. According to the second platform, 26% of sugar daddies in Brasília have a net worth above R$10 million and 18% earn more than R$500,000 a month. In Rio de Janeiro, the first platform counts 181,000 sugar daddies, 85% of them earning more than R$50,000 a month.

For a sense of scale: 18% of 136,000 would be about 24,000 people in Brasília earning more than R$6 million a year, in a city of fewer than 3 million people.

The case of Santa Catarina

A sugar platform reported that the state of Santa Catarina has almost 2 million registered users, a figure the press presented as a sign that the state was one of the main hubs of the sugar lifestyle. That would be roughly one in four residents of the state, counting children and the elderly.

The same platform reports 293,000 sugar daddies in Santa Catarina and 181,000 in Rio de Janeiro, which has more than twice the population. The comparison helps show that these totals measure accumulated sign-ups, not necessarily people using the service today.

A sign-up isn't the same as an active user

Sign-up databases tend to grow over time, because they include old, inactive, and duplicate accounts, as well as people who joined out of curiosity and never came back. An account created in 2016 may still be counted in 2026. This is true of almost any dating app, not just sugar ones.

These are also internal company figures, which usually aren't independently audited. That doesn't mean they're wrong, only that they measure something different from "how many people are in a sugar relationship."

An estimate based on public data

Instead of counting sign-ups, we started from who would have the money to be a sugar daddy. According to Brazil's Federal Revenue Service, about 42 million Brazilians file income tax returns, and 14% of them earn more than R$200,000 a year. That's 5.88 million people.

Since high income is more concentrated among men, we assumed 60% of this group is male: 3.53 million men. R$200,000 a year, about R$16,700 a month, is a low bar for sustaining a sugar arrangement, so the base is already generous.

What remains is how many of these men would be willing to enter a sugar relationship. There's no representative survey on this in Brazil. The closest reference is an academic study in Hungary with 836 participants, in which 8.3% said they were in a sugar relationship. Since the sample was recruited online, the result tends to run high. Even so, we used a range of 10% to 20%, above the Hungarian figure.

Step	Value
Income tax filers	42 million
Earning over R$200,000/year (14%)	5.88 million
Men (60%)	3.53 million
Willing to be a sugar daddy (10% to 20%)	350,000 to 700,000

So how many are there?

Our estimate lands between 350,000 and 700,000 sugar daddies in Brazil, and that's a ceiling, not a midpoint. The income cutoff is low and the willingness rate is above what the reference study found. The number of men who have the income to be sugar daddies and actually are should be below 350,000.

The two counts measure different things. Platform numbers show how many sign-ups they have accumulated over the years; our estimate tries to measure how many men have the income and willingness for a sugar relationship. Together, they help paint a clearer picture of the real size of the sugar world in Brazil.