Pregão (Brazil Reverse Auction Procedure)
Pregão is the Brazilian bidding modality for common goods and services, run as a reverse auction in which bidders lower their prices in successive public bids. Since 30 December 2023 it no longer has its own statute: Lei 10.520/2002 was revoked and pregão is defined inside Lei 14.133/2021 (arts. 6, XLI; 28, I; and 29). It is obligatory for common goods and services, may be judged only on menor preço or maior desconto, and federally is conducted electronically on Compras.gov.br.
What changed with the new law
Pregão was created outside the old general statute and lived in Lei 10.520/2002 for two decades. That law was revoked on 30 December 2023, together with Lei 8.666/1993 and the RDC provisions of Lei 12.462/2011 (art. 193, II of Lei 14.133/2021, as amended by MP 1.167/2023 and LC 198/2023). A procedure could be grounded in Lei 10.520 only if its edital was published by 29 December 2023.
The modality itself survived intact and became one of the five modalities of the new law. What changed is where the rules live and how the procedure is wired to the rest of the system: judgment now precedes qualification by default, publication is centralised on the PNCP, and the federal operating rules sit in an instrução normativa rather than in a decree issued under the old statutes.
At federal level, electronic sessions judged on menor preço or maior desconto follow IN SEGES/ME 73/2022, in force since 1 November 2022 and amended by IN SEGES/MGI 79/2024. The same instruction covers concorrência judged on those criteria, which is why the two modalities now look so similar in operation.
What can be bought this way
Pregão is obligatory for common goods and services, meaning those whose performance and quality standards can be objectively defined in the edital through usual market specifications (art. 6, XLI; art. 29). Fuel, office supplies, equipment, cleaning, catering and similar recurring purchases are the typical objects.
The exclusions matter as much as the scope. Pregão does not apply to specialised technical services of a predominantly intellectual nature, nor to works and engineering services, except the common engineering services defined in art. 6, XXI, (a) (art. 29, sole paragraph). A design, consultancy or supervision contract that arrives labelled as a pregão is a warning sign worth raising in the clarification phase.
The criteria are limited
A pregão may be judged only on menor preço or maior desconto (art. 6, XLI). Where maior desconto is used, the discount is measured against a global price fixed in the edital and extends to any later amendments (art. 34, para. 2). Technical scoring is not available in a pregão; if quality differentiation is needed, the object is not common and the modality is wrong.
How the session runs
The edital and its annexes are published in full on the PNCP, with an extract in the official gazette and in a newspaper (art. 54). The minimum period before the deadline is 8 working days for goods and 10 working days for common services and common engineering works (art. 55).
Bidding may be open, closed or a combination, but a closed-only mode is prohibited for menor preço and maior desconto, so a pregão always includes a public bidding stage (art. 56). The edital may fix a minimum increment between bids (art. 57). Where the winning bid beats the second-placed proposal by at least 5 per cent, the administration may reopen open bidding to settle the remaining places (art. 56, para. 4).
Once the result is defined, the administration may negotiate better conditions with the first-placed bidder, and with the following bidders in order if the first is disqualified for remaining above the maximum price (art. 61).
Only then does qualification begin. Under the standard sequence of art. 17, habilitação follows judgment, so the documents of the provisional winner are the ones examined; federally these are drawn from SICAF. The order can be inverted, but only where the edital provides for it and the decision is reasoned (art. 17, para. 1).
Appeals are compressed. An intention to appeal against the judgment of proposals or a qualification decision must be stated immediately, on pain of preclusion, and the reasons are filed within 3 working days; counter-arguments have the same period, and the whole matter is decided in a single stage (art. 165).
Electronic by default
Licitações are held preferentially in electronic form, and an in-person session must be justified and recorded on audio and video (art. 17, paras. 2 and 5). Federally, the electronic form is mandatory for the menor preço and maior desconto criteria under IN SEGES/ME 73/2022. Municipalities with up to 20,000 inhabitants have until April 2027 to comply with the electronic-form requirement (art. 176), which is the main reason in-person sessions still appear in small municipalities.
What it means for a supplier
A pregão rewards cost discipline and preparation rather than proposal writing. Your qualification file needs to be current before you bid, because it will be examined on a short clock after the auction, not before it. Your floor price should be set before the session starts, since the bidding stage is public, fast and designed to compress margins. And because the criterion is price or discount alone, differentiation has to come from cost structure, logistics and reliability, not from the proposal document.