Construction is one of the most important sectors in terms of economic volume and number of employees. It represents approximately 10% of the Gross Domestic Product of the European Union and employs 7% of its total labour force. In a construction project, procurement is employed in many of the stages, so it can constitute an adequate mechanism to integrate sustainability initiatives. Research concerning economic aspects in procurement has always been present in the construction sector, whereas research related to environmental aspects has been gaining attention in the last years. Nevertheless, social aspects are still not very present in the literature on public procurement. The main objective of this research is to analyse the use of social criteria in public tendering processes of public works in the Valencian region of Spain. The results show that Valencian public entities include social criteria for the 11.7% of adjudicated public works. This value is very low when compared with other studies developed in different countries worldwide. Social criteria, just like in other cases, are used more frequently the larger the budget of the project and the longer the execution time. The average weight of social criteria for the tendering process is low (7.0 out of 100), although entities that usually consider these criteria are aware of their importance and give them a higher weight, in global terms.