The paper aims to present the state of the art of well-being indicators used in connection with the Italian economic policy, and possible extensions to the programming documents of local governments. The starting point is the BES project (from the Italian acronym Benessere Equo e Sostenibile - Equitable and Sustainable Well-being) that aims to measure well-being in Italy and for its regions, developed at Istat since 2010. It takes into account not only the well-being levels, but also its distributional aspects and equity, in addition to conditions needed to preserve at least the same level of well-being for next generations, i.e. sustainability. The project is in line with international experiences and with recommendations stated by the Stiglitz, Sen, Fitoussi Report on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. Since the beginning, the BES project had two aims: to inform all stakeholders about the state and the evolution of well-being at the national and regional level; to build a set of measures, with the quality level granted by official statistics, to support the policy cycle. The first goal was achieved setting up a measurement framework including 12 domains, for material well-being and for other aspect of quality of life, illustrated by means of about 130 indicators, and an annual report that is now at its fifth edition. The second one found a first implementation in 2016 with the approval of a law reforming the Budget Law, establishing that well-being indicators have to be considered in the economic policy process with an analysis of recent trends and through simulations of the expected evolution in a trend and a policy scenario. Starting from the theoretical framework defined to measure well-being at national level, and in a consistent way with it, in 2011-2012 Istat launched two projects to measure the BES at local level: “Provinces’ BES” and “UrBES”. In both cases, the goal was to identify and measure the most suitable indicators to address some specific issues concerning the well-being assessment at sub-regional and local level, as a support for policymaking.