The price of government requirements in airport regulation
Everyone knows it: December is the month when the institutional clock speeds up. It is when balance sheets are closed, old cases are dispatched and pending issues are resolved. The new year must start with a clean desk.
In the airport sector, the end of 2025 followed this script to the letter. Within a few days, the National Civil Aviation Agency (ANAC) approved two extraordinary reviews of major concession contracts (Guarulhos and Confins), both dealing with an issue that, interestingly, had also recently drawn the attention of the Ministry of Ports and Airports: the impact of supervening requirements imposed by the government itself on the economic and financial balance of contracts.
Decisions 729 and 731, both of December 11, 2025, approved by ANAC’s Board of Directors, address very similar situations. In both cases, the Agency recognized that obligations arising from Ordinance 15,205-DG/PF/2021, issued by the Federal Police, significantly changed the operating costs of the airport concessionaires.
These are requirements related to international immigration control, such as providing qualified staff to operate individual booths and, in the case of Confins, also purchasing and operating automated immigration control equipment (e-gates). The key point, however, lies not only in the nature of the obligations, but in the explicit recognition that they were not originally allocated to the concessionaires in the concession contracts.
In the case of Guarulhos International Airport, ANAC approved the extraordinary review to compensate for the costs associated with the requirement to provide staff for the immigration booths as of June 2024. The solution adopted combined classic rebalancing instruments: a temporary 8.43% increase in the International Boarding Fee and a review of the fixed and variable contributions owed by the concessionaire, in the approximate amount of BRL 50.7 million, subject to the approval of the Ministry of Ports and Airports.
In Confins, the logic was the same, although with broader impacts. Decision 731 recognized not only the staff costs, but also the costs of the e-gates, with retroactive effects to the date on which the concessionaire assumed the obligations, in March 2022. The result was a temporary 13.31% increase in the International Boarding Fee and a review of the contractual contributions of about BRL 15 million.
Both decisions adopt a transparent methodology, based on marginal cash flow, with annual review of the amounts by the Airport Economic Regulation Superintendence, precisely to ensure that the rebalancing reflects the costs actually incurred and the revenues actually generated.
More than that, they make it clear that economic and financial balance is not a static state, but a dynamic condition that must be preserved throughout contract performance whenever relevant supervening events change the originally agreed equation.
The most interesting institutional aspect, however, may lie outside ANAC’s decisions themselves. A few weeks earlier, the Ministry of Ports and Airports had issued Ordinance 681/2025, establishing procedures to assess obligations not originally provided for in airport concession contracts that are imposed by federal Public Administration bodies.
The Ordinance is based on a simple but powerful premise: the fragmentation of the State cannot automatically translate into a transfer of costs to the concessionaire. By reaffirming the need for regulatory predictability, proper risk allocation and preservation of economic and financial balance, the Ministry (MPOR) signals that supervening requirements imposed by the government itself must be treated as institutional events, not as invisible risks embedded in the contract.
Taken together, the MPOR Ordinance and ANAC’s decisions reveal a rare but welcome alignment between public policy and regulation. The Ministry sets the guideline: new government requirements must be assessed in light of sector public policy and their contractual impacts.
The agency, in turn, puts this guideline into practice, recognizing the right to rebalancing and defining, with regulatory expertise, the appropriate instruments to restore it. The result is a clear message to the market and to public bodies themselves: changing the rules of the game has a cost, and that cost cannot be silently absorbed by long-term contracts.
It may not be an exaggeration to say that these decisions, published in the second half of December, close 2025 with a significant signal for 2026. Less improvisation, more institutional coordination; less rhetoric about legal certainty, more administrative practice. If this dialogue between public policy and regulation is consolidated, the airport infrastructure sector is likely to start next year with something increasingly rare and increasingly necessary: predictability.
This set of acts also helps to reframe a recurring debate in infrastructure concessions: the still widespread idea that every regulatory or normative risk must automatically be internalized by the concessionaire as part of the “cost of doing business”.
ANAC’s decisions show exactly the opposite. When the change stems from a specific government decision, external to the contract and not originally priced in, the risk is no longer a business risk but an institutional one. And, as such, it must be addressed through the instruments proper to administrative law and economic regulation.
There is also an important educational aspect. By making the review of contractual contributions subject to the approval of the Ministry of Ports and Airports, ANAC reinforces the role of the Granting Authority as coordinator of sector public policy, avoiding fragmented solutions and strengthening contract governance. At the same time, by providing for periodic reviews of the marginal cash flow, the Agency signals that rebalancing is not a blank check, but a technical mechanism subject to monitoring, adjustment and transparency.
In an environment in which the debate on legal certainty often gets lost in abstractions, these decisions have the merit of translating principles into concrete administrative practice. Predictability, here, does not mean the absence of change, but clarity about how changes will be handled.
Economic and financial balance does not appear as an obstacle to regulation, but as a condition for it to be sustainable over time. And proper risk allocation ceases to be a contractual slogan and becomes an effective decision-making criterion.
In the end, perhaps the best summary lies in the calendar itself. Resolving these issues before the turn of the year may not have been merely a bureaucratic coincidence.
It was also an institutional gesture closing a cycle, indicating that the sector enters 2026 with clearer parameters on how to deal with supervening requirements, how public policy and regulation interact, and what the limits (and responsibilities) of the State itself are in the performance of long-term contracts.
Bring on 2026. And may it come with fewer unpriced surprises, more coordination among public bodies and, above all, with contracts that remain instruments of public policy – not its victims. Happy 2026!
