The management of public irrigated perimeters has been considered crucial in many countries. In many scientific papers the main problem raised is the process of transference of management from the public sector to the private users. Thus, the objective of this paper is to study CODEVASF’s sixteen public irrigated perimeters in order to evaluate their emancipation process. Both bibliographic research and analysis of Brazilian legislation were done and a methodological proposal was elaborated which allows for evaluation of those perimeters in function of their peculiarities, especially management efficiency, operation and maintenance of their infrastructure, solvency of the producers, profitability of the agricultural activity and soil use. The indicators representative of these items were statistically treated with SPSS software to determine a model for identifying mathematically when a perimeter meets all the emancipation conditions. Results show that the proposed model is adequate and, although there were advances in CODEVASF’s irrigated perimeters management transference process, there are still some difficulties related mainly to inspection and contractual instruments, which suggests the necessity of trying different forms of transference authorized by Brazilian legislation.