Sustainable development (SD) as popularized by the Brundtland Commission and politically enshrined in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has been the explicit focus of sustainability science. While there is broad agreement that the trend of human wellbeing () over time should serve as sustainability criterion, the literature so far has mostly addressed this in terms of its determinants rather than focusing on itself. There is broad agreement that an indicator for should have multiple constituents, clearly going beyond GDP. Here, we propose a tailor-made indicator to serve precisely this purpose following a set of specified desiderata, including its applicability to flexibly defined sub-national populations by gender, place of residence, ethnicity and other relevant characteristics. The indicator, Years of Good Life (YoGL), reflects the evident fact that in order to be able to enjoy any quality of life, one has to be alive and thus is primarily based on life expectancy. But since mere survival is not considered as good enough, life years are counted conditional on meeting minimum standards in two dimensions: the objective dimension of capable longevity (consisting of being out of absolute poverty and enjoying minimal levels of physical and cognitive health) and the subjective dimension of overall life satisfaction. We illustrate the calculation of this indicator for countries and sub-populations at different stages of development and with different degrees of data availability.