Approaches towards national planning have undergone considerable changes in recent years, from emphasis on growth to a greater concern for the distribution of income and towards planning to meet basic needs. Considerable advances have also been made in cost‐benefit analysis, particularly in estimating accounting prices and deriving weights for measuring a project's distributional impact, but little attempt has been made to see to what extent social cost‐benefit analysis may aid a policy of satisfying basic needs. The conclusion of this paper is that whereas a policy of satisfying individual basic needs may be assisted by using the techniques, this is less likely to be so for communal basic needs such as health or education. It is suggested that one way in which cost‐benefit analysis might assist would be to put a weight on output according to some measure of the need of the recipient. This would be analagous to incorporating merit‐want goods an objective in project appraisal.