Section M

How to Decode Section M Evaluation Criteria

By Brenda Crist, June 26, 2026

Most proposal teams read Section M evaluation criteria for compliance. The teams that win, however, read it for strategic intelligence. Section M tells you what the government will score, but a disciplined analyst reads deeper: how the agency thinks about risk, how confident it is in its own requirements, and how much flexibility it intends to preserve for itself at award. Here are some hints to decode what Section M is really telling you in best value proposals.