BACKGROUND The term quality of life (in Portuguese, Qualidade de Vida; QV) has been expanded and modified over the years and has come to signify social development in terms of education, health, and leisure as well as economic issues. OBJECTIVE To analyze the perception of QV in adolescents with hearing and visual impairments and the effects of socio-demographic characteristics on the domains of QV. METHODS This descriptive series study comprised 42 adolescents aged 10 to 19 years who were students at Recife's state schools. The World Health Organization Quality of Life-Abbreviated questionnaire was used to evaluate QV. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and the Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests with a significance level of p < 0.05. RESULTS The global perception of QV was higher among adolescents with visual impairments than among those with hearing impairments. Among the individual components of QV, the environment domain garnered the lowest scores independent of the type of impairment. The subjects with visual impairments reported higher scores for social relationships, while the psychological domain scored higher among those with hearing impairments. The students integrated into normal classrooms perceived better QV in the psychological and social relationships domains than did those who sat in special classrooms. CONCLUSIONS The environmental domain was the worst component of the QV of handicapped adolescents, suggesting a need for greater investments in policies to improve the QV of this population.