How to Write Or Equal Specification Language

A specification that names one manufacturer is a delivery date you wrote yourself, and you usually wrote it eighteen months before anyone noticed. Or equal specification language is the clause that undoes that, and it is the most commonly copied and least commonly understood sentence in a utility solicitation. Most specs that carry it get no benefit, because the two words show up without the three things that make them mean anything.

The failure is quiet. Bids come back, one product is clearly what the spec described, the alternates get argued about in a conference room, and the buyer either takes the named make because it is defensible or takes the cheap alternate because it is cheap. Either way the document did no work.

This is about the document. What a performance specification states, where or equal belongs, what has to accompany it so equal does not become a race to the least compliant bidder, and how to run a substitution review that holds up when a commissioner asks why the award went where it went.

The Three Kinds of Specification

There are only three, and confusing them is where most of this goes wrong.

A proprietary specification states a part number. It is a purchase instruction. It is fast to write, it guarantees you get the thing you already have, and it hands one manufacturer’s order book your schedule.

A performance specification states what the equipment must do and how you will know it did. Function and duty, electrical and mechanical ratings, the standards it conforms to, and the tests or documentation that prove it. It names nothing. Any manufacturer who can meet it can bid.

Brand name or equal is the instrument in between. It names a product as a reference so bidders can see the target, and then permits alternates that meet the stated characteristics. It is the right tool when writing a full performance specification is impractical, which is more often than specification purists admit. A pad-mounted enclosure with a particular bolt pattern that has to fit an existing pad is easier to reference than to describe.

The instrument you pick is a real decision. The one that is never defensible is the fourth one nobody admits to writing: a proprietary specification with the words “or equal” pasted at the end.

When a Restrictive Specification Becomes a Federal Problem

If any federal award money touches the purchase, whether a FEMA public assistance obligation, a Department of Energy grid grant, or a USDA program, the uniform grant rules apply to how you buy.

2 CFR 200.319 requires procurement under a federal award to be conducted in a manner providing full and open competition, and then lists situations considered restrictive of it. Paragraph (c)(6) is the one that matters here: specifying only a brand name product instead of allowing an equal product to be offered. It sits in the same list as unreasonable qualification requirements and excessive bonding.

The regulation does not ban naming a product. Paragraph (d)(2) permits a brand name or equivalent description when it is impractical or uneconomical to describe the technical requirements precisely, on one condition that most specs skip: the specific features of the named brand must be clearly stated.

Federal direct purchasing says the same thing in sharper words. FAR 11.104 requires a brand name or equal purchase description to include, in addition to the brand name, a general description of those salient physical, functional or performance characteristics of the brand name item that an equal item must meet to be acceptable for award. FAR 11.105 governs the other direction, when only one manufacturer’s product will do: the agency has to find that the feature is essential and that market research shows other products cannot meet or be modified to meet the need, document the basis in the file, and post the documentation above twenty-five thousand dollars.

Read those two together and the design intent is obvious. You may name a product. You may even require one. What you may not do is skip the work of saying what the naming is for.

For a municipal utility or a cooperative, the practical version is simpler than the citations suggest. If your spec names a make and you cannot state, in one sentence, which of its characteristics an alternate has to match, then you do not have or equal specification language. You have a sole source without the paperwork.

The Cooperative Case That Bounds the Field

Electric cooperatives that borrow from the Rural Utilities Service work inside a constraint most spec templates never mention, and it changes what the word equal can mean.

Under 7 CFR 1728.70(a), an RUS borrower purchases only materials listed in the List of Materials Acceptable for Use on Systems of RUS Electrification Borrowers, or materials holding a current technical acceptance from RUS. Paragraph (c) allows unlisted items case by case, for emergencies where listed material is not readily available from industry, for experimental use, or for a specific documented need, with prior approval.

So an alternate can meet every salient characteristic you wrote and still be unusable on that system. That is not a reason to drop or equal language. It is a reason to write the boundary into the clause instead of letting a bidder find it after award, which is how a good-faith alternate turns into a change order.

There is a second move here that almost nobody makes, and it is worth more than the clause itself. The acceptance path is public and it is not fast. A manufacturer submits a written request with the identifying number and description, specifications of manufacture, drawings and test data, and a sample unless waived (7 CFR 1728.40), and a technical standards committee reviews it, with acceptance requiring a unanimous decision at the first committee and a majority at the second (7 CFR 1728.30). If there is a second source you would like to be able to buy from in two years, the time to tell that manufacturer to start is now, not during the bid window when the answer can only be no.

What a Performance Specification Actually States

Four things, and the order is deliberate.

Function and duty. What the equipment does, where it sits, and what it has to survive. A three-phase pad-mounted unit serving a commercial loop feeder with a stated fault duty and a stated loading profile is a requirement. A catalog number is not.

Ratings. Voltage class, kVA or ampere rating, basic insulation level, impedance and its tolerance, temperature rise, connection and taps. These are the numbers a factory designs against.

Standards conformance. Name the standards, not the vendor. For liquid-immersed transformers that is the IEEE C57.12 family: C57.12.00 for general requirements, C57.12.20 for overhead units, C57.12.34 for three-phase pad-mounted, and C57.12.28 for pad-mounted enclosure integrity. For automatic circuit reclosers, IEEE C37.60. Efficiency is a legal floor rather than a preference, and for distribution transformers built on or after April 23, 2029 it is set by 10 CFR Part 431 Subpart K. Our DOE 2029 transformer efficiency standards guide covers what that does to an order placed today.

Evidence. What the manufacturer has to hand you and when. Certified test reports, design test records for the specific design offered, a nameplate drawing for approval, and the domestic-content certification if the job is federally funded. This is the paragraph that separates a specification from a wish, and it is the one most often left out.

What deliberately stays out of a performance specification: a catalog number, a proprietary enclosure feature that only one line produces, a fitting unique to one vendor’s accessory family, and any dimension that is a consequence of one manufacturer’s design rather than a requirement of your installation.

Or Equal Without Evaluation Criteria Is a Race to the Bottom

Here is the objection people raise, and it is a fair one. Open the field and you will get the cheapest thing that can plausibly claim to comply, and you will spend the next fifteen years maintaining it.

That outcome is real, and it is caused by a missing paragraph rather than by the or equal clause. If price is the only stated tiebreak, price is the only tiebreak. Equivalence is a threshold test, and a threshold test with nothing behind it selects on the one dimension you left measurable. Or equal specification language opens the field; the evaluation section decides what winning the field requires.

Four things belong next to the clause.

State the salient characteristics as a short explicit list rather than burying them in prose. An alternate is measured against that list and nothing else, which protects the bidder as much as the buyer.

State the evidence an alternate has to submit, and require it with the equivalency request rather than after award. Certified test reports for the offered design, dimensional drawings, and a written point-by-point response to the salient characteristics list.

State the non-price evaluation factors and their weight before bids open. Delivery commitment and what backs it, service footprint measured in drive time, spare parts availability and the term of that commitment, and standards conformance evidence. Our framework for scoring those against each other is in How to Evaluate Transformer Bids When Lead Times Exceed Two Years.

State who decides and by when. A named role, a written determination, and a deadline.

A Substitution Review a Commissioner Can Defend

The process is short and the point of writing it down is that it produces a record before anyone has an interest in the outcome.

Set a deadline for equivalency requests before bids are due, far enough out to answer them. Ten calendar days is common and seven is workable. After that deadline, the specification is what it is.

Require the request in writing, on your form, with the point-by-point response and the test evidence attached. An alternate offered without the evidence is non-responsive, and saying so in advance is what makes that defensible later.

Answer every determination by addendum to all bidders, not by a phone call to the one who asked. An approval that only one bidder knows about is a competitive advantage you granted rather than a determination you made.

Write the determination as one paragraph naming the characteristics you checked and the evidence you checked them against. This is the document that gets read in a protest, a rate case, or a board meeting, and one paragraph written on the day beats a reconstructed memory a year later.

Handle post-award substitution separately and more strictly. A substitution requested after award, when the competitive alternative is gone, is a different transaction, and the specification should say what happens to the price and the schedule when one is granted.

Where This Actually Buys You Schedule

The competition argument is the one that gets made in public. The schedule argument is the one that pays.

A May 2026 supplemental report on large power transformer supply chains from the National Laboratory of the Rockies, NLR/TP-5700-96742, records how one domestic transformer manufacturer copes with the component bottleneck: it orders extra inventory ahead of time, or asks customers to be open to different makes or specifications, to address lead times the same report puts at 80 to 90 weeks for on-load tap changers and up to 130 weeks for bushings. One manufacturer is not a market, and that report covers large power transformers rather than distribution units. But it is a builder saying, in a federal report, what makes a job buildable. A specification that permits qualified equivalents lets a factory build from what is on its floor. A specification that names one bushing make inherits that make’s queue, and bushings run longer than the tank they bolt into, which we covered in Transformer Bushing Lead Times Now Exceed the Transformer.

Be precise about what this does and does not buy, because the two get conflated constantly. Permitting equivalents widens the field of things that can be built for you. It does not reserve capacity. Holding a place in a factory calendar is a commercial instrument and a separate conversation, and that one is covered in Equipment Production Slot Reservation Replaces the Order. A wide specification with no slot still waits. A slot with a narrow specification wastes the position on one supplier’s queue. The two work together and neither substitutes for the other.

Where Or Equal Does Not Belong

There are places where naming a make is the correct engineering answer, and pretending otherwise produces worse outcomes than a restrictive spec does.

Interchangeability with an existing spare inventory is a legitimate requirement, and it is worth stating as a requirement rather than smuggling it in as a part number. Protection coordination is another: a recloser control whose settings and curves your existing coordination study was built around is not casually equivalent to one that is electrically similar. Retrofit footprint, where the unit has to land on an existing pad and terminate into existing cable, constrains dimensions for real reasons. A standardization program has genuine value in training, spares and crew familiarity, and that value is defensible when you have written it down as a criterion.

The distinction is not whether you restrict. It is whether the restriction is a requirement you can state or a habit you inherited. FAR 11.105 is the useful discipline even outside federal contracting: could you write down why this feature is essential, and what market research told you nothing else meets it?

One more boundary that catches people on federally funded work. Domestic content is not a salient characteristic you can waive at bid opening. An alternate that meets every electrical requirement and fails Build America Buy America is not an equal on that job, and the eligibility question has to be settled before the equivalency review, not during it. We cover the certification problem in BABA Compliance for Transformer Procurement.

Before Your Next Solicitation Goes Out

Pull the last specification you issued and check four things. This is the whole of what or equal specification language costs you to get right, and all four are edits rather than decisions.

Every named make: is there a written list of the characteristics an alternate must match? If not, either write the list or drop the name.

Every “or equal”: is there a deadline, a submission requirement, and a named decider? If not, the clause is decorative.

Every evaluation section: is there a non-price factor with a stated weight? If not, you have written a low-bid award with extra steps.

Every federally funded line item: does the domestic-content requirement sit ahead of the equivalency review rather than after it?

None of that requires a budget approval, a new supplier, or a consultant. It requires editing a document you already own, before it goes out rather than after the bids come back. The whole state of this market, and what it is doing to the equipment behind these specs, sits in Transformer Procurement in 2026.

We publish a free monthly read on where lead times, supplier capacity and federal sourcing rules are actually moving, written for the people who have to put a date in front of a board. If your next specification is going out into this market, The Feeder is the one to have.

Related Reading

• Transformer Bushing Lead Times Now Exceed the Transformer
• How to Evaluate Transformer Bids When Lead Times Exceed Two Years
• Equipment Production Slot Reservation Replaces the Order

Frequently Asked Questions

What is or equal specification language?

Or equal specification language names a product as a reference point and then permits any other product that meets the stated salient characteristics. It sits between a proprietary specification, which names one part number, and a full performance specification, which describes function, ratings, standards and tests without naming anything.

Is a brand-name-only specification allowed on a federally funded project?

2 CFR 200.319(c)(6) lists specifying only a brand name product instead of allowing an equal product to be offered as a situation considered restrictive of competition. 2 CFR 200.319(d)(2) permits a brand name or equivalent description when it is impractical to describe the requirement precisely, but requires that the specific features of the named brand be clearly stated.

What are salient characteristics?

They are the physical, functional and performance features an alternate product must meet to be acceptable. FAR 11.104 requires a brand name or equal purchase description to include a general description of them. If they are not written down, or equal has no standard to be measured against and the review becomes a judgment call after bids open.

Does or equal work for an electric cooperative that borrows from RUS?

It works, but the field is bounded. Under 7 CFR 1728.70(a) an RUS borrower purchases only materials on the List of Materials or materials holding a current technical acceptance from RUS. An alternate that meets your salient characteristics but has no RUS acceptance is not usable on that system, so the specification should say so rather than leaving a bidder to discover it after award.

Does allowing equals shorten lead times?

It can, at the component level. A May 2026 supplemental report from the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR/TP-5700-96742) records one domestic transformer manufacturer saying it addresses long tap changer and bushing lead times by ordering extra inventory ahead of time or asking customers to be open to different makes or specifications. That is one manufacturer on large power transformers, not a survey of the distribution market. A specification that permits qualified equivalents lets a factory build from what is on its floor. It does not secure a place in the build calendar, which is a separate commercial question.