The growing global awareness of sustainability, aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals, has driven the adoption of sustainable practices in public administration, especially following the enactment of Law 14.133/2021. This new legal framework establishes that public procurement must promote sustainable national development, aiming to mitigate environmental impacts, including those caused by the construction industry. Thus, engineering works and services must be tendered considering the sustainable aspects of their contracts, highlighting the need for public institutions to adopt specific criteria to assess the sustainability of engineering projects. In this context, this study proposes the use of indicators as a tool to evaluate and monitor the degree of sustainability in engineering projects contracted by public administration. The methodology involves comparing national and international environmental certification criteria, resulting in sustainability indicators adapted to the needs of public projects. The empirical field of the research for the application of the indicators was a project by the Brazilian Navy in Rio de Janeiro. The evaluation identifies that the project achieved an intermediate level of sustainable actions adoption, a result that reflects the deficiencies in the participants knowledge and discusses the need to incorporate sustainability indicators as tools to monitor and assess sustainable practices in public administration projects, integrate sustainability into engineering works, and align projects with legal requirements and global sustainable development goals.