The Hungarian public procurement procedure for highways projects is based exclusively on the financial aspect of the proposals. (Usually, the lowest price bids win.) However, this practice implies an important potential risk: the winner offering the lowest price can produce a low-quality work which might cause much higher loss at national economy level than the benefit coming from its relatively low price. Recognizing this fact, a research work was initiated in KTI to evaluate major highway contractors acting in Hungary by evaluating the actual performance of their past road projects.(It was supposed that if a contractor proved to have been worked at a low quality level in the past, it would not perform better in the future, either). The average deterioration rates of various project groups based on the results of their yearly surface defect assessment carried out on the whole network in Hungary are calculated for the projects built in a given year using high number of samples, selected randomly from the road data bank. Besides, the pavement performance models of various road types based on 20-year monitoring of trial sections are also utilized. The ESAL-value in the year of construction, and the one in 2010 are also taken into account. Based on these values, quality indices are given to the actual yearly deterioration rate of a given project executed by the contractor investigated. The average of these quality indices for a given contractor is a fairly appropriate parameter to characterize its general quality level during a multi-year period in the recent past. These particular average indices permit the comparison of the general "contractor quality levels" of various competing contractors and the eventual consideration of this indicator in the evaluation of bids submitted by a firm in a future public procurement. Another obvious advantage of applying the suggested evaluation methodology is the increased competition between road pavement industries (firms) that can lower prices and save public money. A case study is shown proving the applicability of the suggested contractor evaluating methodology. Finally, some ideas on the further development of the procedure are presented.