The Courts of Justice (TJs) of the states and the Federal District paid judges at least R$ 10.7 billion above the constitutional salary cap in 2025, according to an unpublished study by Transparência Brasil and República.org.
Among the 15,000 judges and appellate judges for whom complete data is available, 98% received salaries exceeding the cap last year. More than half (56%) received more than R$ 500,000 above the constitutional limit—of these, 3,819 judges, equivalent to one in four, exceeded R$ 1 million in payments above the cap.
Only 255 judges (1.7% of the total analyzed) had compensation that complied with the cap, reinforcing the purely symbolic nature of the constitutional limit.
The study adopted a conservative methodology, excluding payments for the constitutional one-third vacation allowance and the Christmas bonus (13th-month salary) from the amounts above the cap. The results already include the cap-reduction deductions shown on pay stubs—that is, the amounts withheld by the courts when compensation benefits exceed the cap.
The São Paulo State Court of Justice (TJ-SP) accounted for the largest volume of payments above the cap and also the largest number of judges with earnings exceeding R$1 million: 3,039 of its 3,452 members, equivalent to 88% of the court. The courts in São Paulo and Piauí also stood out with the two highest average gross salaries paid last year: R$140,100 and R$140,800 per month, respectively.
All 27 courts analyzed recorded payments exceeding the salary cap in 2025. In 24 of them, the data submitted to the National Council of Justice allowed for a precise examination of the payments made. The salary cap applied by each court ranges from over R$100,000 at the Court of Justice of Paraíba (TJ-PB) to R$2.4 million at the Court of Justice of Piauí (TJ-PI)—the highest amounts recorded for a single judge in a single month.
The volume of payments exceeding the cap more than doubled compared to 2023, when a Transparência Brasil survey, using the same methodology, identified R$ 4.5 billion in payments exceeding the cap.
These excessive salaries were driven by retroactive payments, which totaled R$ 4 billion, and benefits linked to length of service, which reached R$ 2.6 billion. In the first case, these are amounts that, according to the courts, should have been paid in previous fiscal years. The second category includes compensatory leave and bonuses for cumulative service, which can increase compensation by up to one-third and are typically paid as severance, outside the scope of the pay cap.
“The constitutional cap will only regain its authority with the passage of legislation that clearly, specifically, and restrictively defines which benefits can be considered compensation. Without that, the cap will remain merely symbolic,” says Juliana Sakai, executive director of Transparência Brasil.
“The data show that the constitutional cap does not work in practice today. When nearly all judges receive salaries above the limit and a significant portion of them earn more than R$ 1 million per year in amounts exceeding the cap, we are facing a structural distortion that must be addressed,” says Isadora Modesto, executive director of República.org.
In this context, the organizations express support for the recent actions by the Federal Supreme Court that may restrict perks, and advocate for the Supreme Court to uphold the preliminary injunctions issued by Justices Flávio Dino (RCL 88319) and Gilmar Mendes (ADI 6606) in a hearing scheduled for tomorrow, March 25, 2026.
