Research relevance. The quality of various services, including social ones, is most often studied using marketing and legal approaches. Less often the study of the quality of this type of service is carried out in the context of the problems of the welfare state. Although it is one of the functions of the government bodies to provide the quality of social services and to create conditions for improvement of the quality of life of citizens. At the same time, an independent assessment of the quality of the services provision has been understudied. The research goal is to study the state of quality assessment of social services for the elderly in the context of the transformation of the welfare state. Methods. In addition to traditional methods (analysis of theoretical literature, regulatory legal acts, statistical data, reports based on the results of an independent assessment of the conditions for the provision of social services), a sociological method is used - a semi-structured in-depth interview, where interviewers are social service providers, heads of the Ministry of Social Policy of the Sverdlovsk Region. Scientific novelty. The article reveals the correlation between the processes of transformation of the Russian Federation as a social welfare state and the changes taking place in the social services for the elderly. It classifies the causes that affect the quality of the social services provision. Results. It was revealed that in recent years there have been large-scale changes in social services for the elderly: new norms governing the provision of social services, quality standards of social services, the list of providers, etc. These positive changes are a consequence of the processes of transformation of the Russian Federation as a social welfare state. These changes include the assessment of the quality of the social services provision for the elderly. This research reveals and classifies the reasons that prevent the achievement of a high level of quality of the services provision.