The performance, efficiency and quality of public service generally depends on the efforts of each public servant, his/her motivated intent to practice a new initiative-based lawful behavior and make additional efforts to achieve the best results in his/her professional activities. The better a public servant works – the higher the indicators of his/her performance are according to performance assessment, and this justifies the need for a consistent response by the State in the form of additional benefits for this person manifested through a variety of incentives. The effective use of such a resource as public servants’ performance assessment, as well as the incentives based on the results thereof, depends on the entrenchment of their legal foundations, on the perfection of the contents and consistency with foreign counterparts, given the innovative nature for the national legal science, legislation and law application, and this becomes increasingly more relevant in the context of radical updating of the Ukrainian legislation on public service and its scientific basis. The purpose of the article is to analyze the results of entrenchment of the foundations of public servants performance assessment and the use of incentives based thereon in the national legislation, at the same time comparing them with foreign counterparts for the sake of identifying the extent to which the model chosen for resolving this issue is consistent with the real needs and challenges of today, and also for formulating the author’s proposals of corrective nature. The article demonstrates that Ukraine has implemented the model of “assessment of public servant’s qualities” which is common in the countries of the continental legal family; however, the approach used by the legislator to entrench this model’s foundations, inter alia, in terms of borrowing the foreign experience, is rather simplified and selective with regard to defining the basic concepts, principles, stages, tools of the assessment procedure, the range and variety of the incentives based thereon, and with regard to formulating the regulatory provisions proper (mainly a generalized and contradictory meaning, too much evaluation concepts, etc.), thus entailing law application problems. The author makes a conclusion that the national model of normative regulation of the assessment principles and incentives based thereon does not fully meet the needs and challenges of today. To achieve an improvement, the author proposes to enhance the foundations of its transparency, publicity, openness, objectivity, certainty, separation of powers between the subjects setting objectives and key performance indicators and the independent subject of assessment of their performance by using “the assessment criteria catalogues”, involving the wide public, differentiating between legal consequences of negative, positive and excellent assessment, increasing the range and generic diversity of incentives as the outcome of excellent assessment through the status, property, moral and mixed types of incentives and the possibility of using several of them at a time. Thus, it will allow making the national legislation more consistent with the European counterparts and will create the basis for a significant increase of performance, efficiency and quality of public service in Ukraine in general.