Brazil’s road concessions now focus on performance

Brazil’s Agência Nacional de Transportes Terrestres (ANTT), which regulates 18,100 kilometers of roads, shifted its focus to monitoring performance and service quality in road concessions starting in 2021.

Previously, the government dictated how construction should proceed, but now concessionaires have freedom to meet quality goals while the ANTT verifies compliance.

This change uses tools like the “Fator D,” which reduces toll payments when construction is delayed or quality standards aren’t met, in 2019, this lowered average tolls by 5.96% on the BR-050 highway. However, enforcing penalties faces challenges. The agency’s sanction processes are slow and subject to legal challenges, and the MPF found that only 4.13% of the 1.77 billion reais in fines issued from 2008 to 2021 had been paid or were being paid in installments.

The ANTT is currently negotiating converting over 2 billion reais in fines into investments and improvements across more than 4,000 administrative processes. To increase transparency, the Special Secretariat of the Investment Partnerships Program created a dialogue group examining independent verification, considering options like dedicated accounts and pre-approval of companies. The ANTT also standardized traffic triggers in new road concessions, linking expansion projects to vehicle flow to ensure investments match demand.

Despite these advancements, the TCU identified outdated tools and a lack of effectiveness indicators in railway oversight in 2025, and experts suggest agencies need greater financial independence to manage increasingly complex contracts.