This paper looks into performance contracting in Danish central government. Management by Objectives and Results (MBOR) was adopted in central government in Denmark during the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1991, performance contracts between parent ministries and their agencies were introduced in Danish central government. Since their introduction, performance contracts have become central elements in the steering and management of agencies in central government in Denmark, and today they are nearly universally adopted in central government. In Denmark, the Ministry of Finance is responsible for maintaining the MBOR system including setting requirements and recommendations for the design and use of performance contracts, which means that a common central government framework for performance contracting exists. Despite of this common framework, differences in the contract content (scale and focus) are observed across central government agencies, when the content of the performance contracts is compared. This makes it interesting to examine how variation in the content of the performance contracts across agencies can be explained? Based on a broad theoretical framework in which variation in organisational structure, tasks, culture and time with performance contracts is expected to affect the contract content, hypotheses on variation across agencies are deduced. The empirical basis of the paper is a study of all performance contracts between parent ministries and subordinate agencies in Danish central government. For the year 2014 all performance contracts, have been coded according to the amount of performance targets in the contracts and the type of performance targets (activities, outputs, quality, outcomes, productivity or internal development) included in the performance contracts. The analysis is conducted as a mixed methods study in two steps. First, a cross sectional quantitative study is carried out. Hereafter, a range of qualitative interviews is carried out in order to improve the understanding of the results of the quantitative analysis.