Despite abundant evidence on social determinants of health (SDH) and health inequities, effective uptake of the evidence in health policies of high-income countries has been limited. Health policies might acknowledge evidence on SDH but still direct most strategies towards biomedical and behavioural interventions. This article reports on a framework developed for qualitative analysis of health policy documents to assess how and to what extent policies address health inequities and SDH outside health care services. This framework provides an effective way to interrogate health policies on key points raised in recent literature about the translation of evidence on SDH into policy.