The rapid dynamic shifts taking place in the socio-economic sphere increasingly actualize the problems associated with overcoming poverty and inequality, ensuring the availability of resources, and inclusive markets. Together, all phenomena significantly affect the quality of life and correlate with the goals of sustainable development. At the same time, classical approaches to assessing the quality of life have a number of disadvantages and require improvement, in particular, the adoption of a coordinate system that would allow comparing the features and characteristic components of the quality of life in different countries. The article is devoted to the study of the essence and structure, transformation of understanding category «quality of life». Particular attention is paid to the structuring of the components of this category. The strengthening of the importance of the social component in assessing the quality of life has been proved. At the same time, the authors proposed their own methodological approach to assessing the basic components of the quality of life and conducted a corresponding analysis. The author's approach is based on the distinguishing material, communicative and social components. Each of the components covers a number of characteristics that allow you to determine the vector of changes and «reveal problem areas» in the economy and social and labor sphere. In particular, the material component of the quality of life includes the following basic characteristics and indicators: the median distribution of incomes of the population, the level of poverty among the working population, an assessment of decent wages. The «communicative» component includes those indicators and characteristics that make it possible to assess the level of availability of resources to the population, in particular, the level (assessment by the population) of the availability of health services, the level (assessment) of the risk of being unemployed, and the level (assessment) of social security. The social component includes the level of public credibility to institutions (governance, legal proceedings), the level of criminality (individual/personal security), the level of living comfort (infrastructure component) and the level of environmental safety (environmental component). The authors’ ideas on the assessment of social security and an integral assessment of decent wages have been worked out in the article. It has been concluded that it is necessary to change the methodological approaches to assessing the quality of life in order to introduce a prognostic approach.