Introduction. Category of «social capital» widely presents in foreign scientific journals. Russian science also explores this area of know- ledge. Intangibility and the existence in the form of social relations is one of the basic properties of social capital. The paper suggests several approaches to measuring the level of social capital based on the information in domestic and foreign sources. Empirical analysis. Economic experiment can determine the measure of civic identity and mutual support, but the scale of humanity and the possible consequences opposes radical approaches. As a result, there is a problem of measuring level of social capital in society. Both in Russia and in other countries, without access to the complete statistics on indicators of social capital (due to difficulty excluding informal institutions), researchers find synthetic coefficients based on surveys. In connection with this, baseline data collection is limited to conducting sample surveys and expert analytics of WCIOM. Analytical part is a description of the existing and applied in practice methods and elements of the original study based on a comparative analysis of the socio-economic surveys. Discussion of results. The result is a selection of the optimal methods for measuring the level of social capital for comparative studies and the creation of ideas to improve the qualitative component of social capital (206 слов).