Selective breeding poses both threats and opportunities to animal welfare. Modern breeding methods may accelerate the rate of desirable or undesirable genetic change in correlated traits whilst re-focussed selection objectives to meet economic, food security and environmental concerns will likely demand heightened selection pressure on some existing traits and selection on novel traits. Animal welfare remains a consumer priority despite competing concerns. Improving welfare can often contribute to improved economic and environmental sustainability. Predicted impacts on animal welfare should therefore proactively inform selection decisions aimed at meeting the needs of current and future livestock production. Many major welfare issues are long-standing and are likely to persist as management solutions are uneconomical to implement. Breeding presents opportunities to break this deadlock and benefit welfare. Specific examples will illustrate that selection on a range of welfare traits from neonatal survival to social behaviour is technically achievable. Behavioural traits are at the basis of several persistent welfare issues and particular challenges exist in understanding how context-dependent the response to selection will be, and how selection might affect animal experiences and other behavioural traits. Progress in understanding these issues will be illustrated using harmful social behaviours in pigs and chickens as examples. Phenotyping costs remain a barrier to selection on complex welfare traits, even using genomic selection. Efficient but information-rich phenotyping, potentially with the aid of automation, may minimise these costs whilst evidence will be presented that methods such as kin, group or multi-level section on indirect genetic effects is showing promise for benefiting welfare traits without the need for additional phenotyping.