Folha de S.Paulo Paywall: How to Read Folha Articles for Free

Folha de S.Paulo is the São Paulo daily published by Grupo Folha and, by most measures, the largest-circulation newspaper in Brazil. It covers national politics from Brasília, the economy, technology, science, culture and the city of São Paulo, and its columnists and opinion pages carry a lot of weight in Brazilian public debate. Its website lives on the UOL portal, which Grupo Folha also owns, so links start with www1.folha.uol.com.br rather than a folha.com address. Folha was one of the first Brazilian newspapers to put a meter on its site, and because its stories are shared so heavily on WhatsApp and social media, readers who do not subscribe hit the limit quickly. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a full story.

How the Folha de S.Paulo paywall works

Folha uses a metered paywall. Non-subscribers can open a small number of articles each month before the text is cut off and a subscription prompt appears, and the count is kept in a browser cookie. Some columns and premium pieces appear to be restricted from the first visit, though as far as we can tell most news reports start out metered.

The gate is applied in the browser. Folha sends the full article text in the page so that search engines and social networks can index it, and a script then checks your cookie and hides the body if you are over the limit. A crawler-style reader that fetches the page without running that script receives the complete article. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out why that distinction matters.

Our tests on 17 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 1,126-word Folha technology report on the government asking regulators to inspect six games with betting-style mechanics under the Digital ECA child-protection law loaded in full, all 21 paragraphs.
• A 621-word Folha report on a student rally for Flávio Bolsonaro at Mackenzie university in São Paulo loaded in full, all 13 paragraphs.
• A 570-word Folha column by Caetano W. Galindo on thirty years in Brazil's public universities loaded in full, all 16 paragraphs.

Read a Folha de S.Paulo article in full

• Copy the article link. Folha links look like www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2026/10/headline-slug.shtml, with the section name (poder, mercado, tec, colunas) before the date.
• Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
• The story appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and full text.

The reader shows the article in Portuguese, exactly as Folha published it. If you want it in English, your browser's built-in translation works on the reader page. Folha also runs a small English-language international edition, but it covers only a selection of stories and is not a substitute for the main site.

Other approaches

• Newsletters. Folha sends a range of free email newsletters, including a morning briefing and topic letters on politics, business and culture, that summarise the day's stories and link to them.
• Library access. Folha is carried by PressReader, which many public and university libraries offer free to members, so the print edition can often be read through a library login.
• Private windows. The meter lives in a cookie, so a private window resets it, although Folha, like most metered sites, also counts logged-in free registrations separately.
• Related free sources. Agência Brasil, the state news agency, publishes free reports on government and Congress, and official data from the central bank and the statistics agency IBGE is open to anyone.

How it compares with other Brazilian newspapers

The other big national dailies behave in a similar way. O Globo in Rio de Janeiro and Estadão, Folha's São Paulo rival, both loaded in full when we tested them on 17 October 2026. Across the border, Clarín in Buenos Aires passed the same day. Valor Econômico, the business daily from Grupo Globo, returned only short teasers on two of three tests and is not listed. The full list of sites that work is kept current.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

Folha runs one of the largest newsrooms in Latin America, with correspondents in Brasília and abroad and a long record of investigative reporting, and digital subscriptions now pay for a large share of that. If you read Folha most days, a subscription is the right way to keep that reporting going.