Progressive development of legislative regulation with a focus on resolving civil cases based on free will of the parties is one of the most effective ways to improve the civil court procedure. Provisions of the law of procedure are often generalized and thus narrow the possibilities for dealing with unique issues which arise during a trial. The shortcomings present in procedural legislation may be compensated by agreements entered into by the parties regarding the process (procedural contracts) which are underpinned by the basic principles of law of contract (primarily the principle of freedom of contract) but are aimed at the settlement of procedural legal relations. The purpose of the article is to explore the approaches to the definition of “procedural contract” and to analyze the main characteristics of procedural contracts. The national scientific literature and legislation of Ukraine offers no clear definition of the concept of “procedural contract”. The definitions of individual foreign researchers reviewed in the article (in particular, definition of the procedural contract through the concept of contract which is the source of normative regulation of proceedings; through the concept of agreement between participants to procedural legal relations concerning and relating to the exercise of procedural rights and fulfillment of procedural duties; through the concept of legal facts of procedural importance) indicate that the procedural contract is a complex category encompassing a symbiosis of substantive and procedural elements. The procedural contract is a tool making the parties able to obtain additional guarantees for the implementation of legal relations under substantive law which have previously arisen between them, and to make legally valid the procedural actions on which they have reached an agreement. Besides, there is still the unresolved issue of terminological differentiation of such concepts as “procedural contract”, “procedural agreement”, “agreement on the process” which may be cleared in a number of ways (both by synonymous application of these terms and by their differentiation on the basis of different approaches to the legal nature of the procedural contract – qualification of the procedural contract as a purely procedural institution, as an agreement under substantive law or as the agreement leading to procedural consequences).