In the same judgment, the Court decided to maintain at R$600 the amount of income that must be preserved to cover basic expenses during over-indebtedness negotiations
The Federal Supreme Court has a majority this Thursday (April 23, 2026) to decide which debts from payroll loans must be considered in the calculation of , the name given to the portion of income that must be preserved to cover basic expenses during debt negotiations of over-indebted consumers.
In the same trial, which began on Wednesday (April 22), the Court chose to maintain the amount reserved for essential expenses at R$600, but determined that the carry out annual technical studies to support possible floor increases.
The inclusion of the consigned item was proposed by the rapporteur, André Mendonça. Under the current rule, this type of debt is excluded from the calculation of the existential minimum. The majority of ministers considered this exclusion unconstitutional because it ignored installments deducted directly from the consumer’s salary or benefit, which reduces available income at the end of the month.
Mendonça justified the change by citing fraud in INSS discounts, the subject of an investigation at the STF under his report. For the minister, these irregularities reinforce the need to consider this type of debt in the calculation. Alexandre de Moraes followed the rapporteur as he understands that inclusion should have a limited impact on the overall picture, as payroll loans account for only 6% of family debt.
Absent from the previous session, minister Nunes Marques followed Mendonça’s vote this Thursday. He said that disregarding the consignment produced a “arithmetic fiction”, since it treated as available an income that, in practice, had already been previously committed.
Dias Toffoli, Gilmar Mendes and Edson Fachin also accompanied the rapporteur. At this point, ministers Flávio Dino, Cristiano Zanin, Luiz Fux and minister Cármen Lúcia were defeated.
UNDERSTAND THE CASE
The trial discussed the rules of the decree that regulated the . The controversy focused on 2 points: the value of the existential minimum, set at R$600, and the debts that may or may not be included in the calculation to check whether the consumer is over-indebted.
The actions handled by the Court together were the ADPFs, and, which question 2 federal Executive decrees that regulated law 14,181 of 2021.
For the STF, the value of R$600 can be maintained for now, as long as there is a technical basis for a possible review. At the same time, the Court understood that the decree cannot ignore the effect of payroll loans on the consumer’s real income, because this type of loan is deducted directly from the salary or benefit.
The Supreme Court recommended that the CMN and the Executive Branch periodically evaluate the other exclusion hypotheses provided for in the decree, to verify whether they remain compatible with the protection of over-indebted consumers.
