Introduction: In order to measure social welfare, economic indicators have traditionally been used. Underlying such measures is an approach which conceives social welfare as a one-dimensional phenomenon, namely the economic dimension. The objective of this paper is to introduce a new social welfare index (SWI) and its trend for Iran.

  Method: SWI was developed by OECD methodology of constructing composite indicators. Dimentions and indicators of SWI were selected with Delphi technique and were confirmed with exploratory factor analysis. It covers Economy, Health, Housing, Social Security, Education and Employment In this paper SWI as well as its trend have been measured for 1967-2011 in Iran. In order to estimate the trend of total SWI, we have used a uniform dimensions.

  Findings : The results show trend in SWI dissimilar to trend in en social welfare and IEWB. So that, changes in SWI trend, due to more and diverse dimensions, were more than changes in en social welfare and IEWB trend. Some events like a high inflation changes or non-economic indicators have created difference between SWI trend and en social welfare and IEWB. Also, based on SWI, best and worst performances were related to 2009 and 1995 respectively.

  Discussion : SWI represents the changes of the social welfare more accurately, due to more and diverse dimensions and indicators. Thus, it can be a more realistic measure of social welfare.