A month ago, on 25 June 2026, a labour rule that almost nobody associates with public procurement came fully into force: every company in Colombia with 100 or more workers must hire or keep employed at least two people with certified disabilities for every 100 permanent staff, with one additional worker for each further block of 100 from the 501st employee onwards. This is the quota set by the labour reform, Law 2466 of 2025, in paragraph 17 that its article 15 added to article 57 of the Substantive Labour Code. The first year was voluntary; since June it has been fully enforceable, with mandatory reporting to the Ministry of Labour within fifteen days of each hire and fines of up to 5,000 minimum wages for non-compliance.
On 22 July, El Colombiano reported that many companies still lack clarity on how to certify their employees' disabilities, how to calculate the exact quota for their headcount and what the "reasonable adjustments" the law requires in the workplace mean in practice. That is real friction, barely a month after the obligation became enforceable. But there is an angle on the same quota that almost nobody is yet looking at: since March, meeting it — or exceeding it — can also be the difference between winning and losing a state tender.
Decree 287 of 2026, issued on 19 March by the Ministry of Finance and the National Planning Department, amended articles 2.2.1.2.4.2.6 to 2.2.1.2.4.2.8 of Decree 1082 of 2015 to give effect to article 13 of Statutory Law 1618 of 2013, which since 2013 has required the government to create a system of preferences for people with disabilities in state contracting. The decree built that system from several pieces: planning tools for inclusive processes, such as business fairs and division into lots; differentiated eligibility requirements for enterprises owned by people with disabilities; an obligation to build accessibility criteria into the preliminary studies of any contract, whatever the entity's regime; and, the piece most visible to bidders, extra points worth up to 2% of the total available in open tenders and merit-based competitions.
Those points can be earned by two routes, but they do not stack: the bidder may itself be an enterprise of people with disabilities — an individual with a disability practising their profession or trade, or a company where more than 50% of the ownership or at least one management post belongs to people with disabilities — or it may show that its workforce meets or exceeds the minimum Law 2466 of 2025 already requires of it. The decree says so explicitly: the scoring table "already includes the minimum required by Law 2466 of 2025", so that the ordinary employment quota, the very one causing confusion among employers today, becomes a competitive advantage in the selection process for whoever decides to exceed it comfortably.
Verification is not symbolic. The bidder must submit, with its offer, a certification from the legal representative and the statutory auditor or accountant — issued no more than 30 calendar days before the deadline — listing the full name and identity document of each employee with a disability, together with the employment contract, the last three months of social security contributions and the disability certificate from the Ministry of Health; the entity may also cross-check that information against the certificate issued by the Ministry of Labour. In consortium bids, only the headcount of the member with the largest share counts. And the entity, for its part, cannot simply copy the scoring formula: it must justify in the preliminary studies which accessibility criteria apply to the goods, works or services it is procuring, and where no specific technical standard exists, set its own technical specification so the requirement is not left hanging.
For a bidding supplier, the practical message is simple: the Law 2466 quota has stopped being merely a labour obligation to settle before a visit from the Ministry of Labour; it is also information worth points in any open tender or merit-based competition structured from now on, and it is worth documenting with the same discipline as experience or financial capacity. For a state entity, the challenge is not to turn the requirement into one more box in the bidding documents: accessibility has to be substantiated from the planning stage, not improvised once the call for bids has been published. And for anyone overseeing procurement — watchdogs, oversight bodies, competitors who feel disadvantaged — it is worth checking whether the points an entity awarded under this criterion were genuinely backed by valid, verifiable certifications, or applied automatically without checking anything.
At bottom it is the same pattern already seen with quotas for small businesses, young ICBF graduates or signatories of the peace agreement: a social policy is translated into contractual points, and those points serve their purpose only if they are verified case by case. With thousands of processes published every month on SECOP II, that detailed verification — certificate by certificate, tender by tender — is exactly the kind of pattern that stays invisible when you read one process at a time, but becomes visible when you cross-check at scale.