- World
- Mar 25
Finland remains world’s happiest country for 9th year in a row
• Nordic countries lead the happiness rankings once again, with Finland at the top for a record ninth year in a row.
• Finland is followed by Iceland, Denmark, and Costa Rica. Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Israel, Luxembourg, and Switzerland are the other countries in the top ten.
• Costa Rica’s rise to fourth marks the highest ever ranking for a Latin American country.
• Afghanistan is yet again ranked as the unhappiest country in the world, this year again 147th, same as for 2025.
• China was ranked in 65th position this year, down from 68th last year and 60th in 2024; Russia is at 79th (66 in 2025, 72 in 2024), while the USA was at 23rd position this year (24 in 2025, 23 in 2024).
How are the rankings done?
• The World Happiness Report is released each year around March 20, coinciding with the International Day of Happiness, and combines well-being data from across the world with analysis by world-leading researchers from a range of academic disciplines.
• The annual report is published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, in partnership with Gallup, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and an independent editorial board.
• This year’s theme revolved around ‘Happiness and Social Media’.
Key determinants of happiness include:
i) GDP per capita
ii) Healthy life expectancy
iii) Social support (having someone to count on)
iv) Freedom to make life choices
v) Generosity
vi) Perceptions of corruption.
• Respondents evaluate their current life as a whole using the image of a ladder, with the best possible life for them as a 10 and the worst possible as a 0.
• Each respondent provides a numerical response on this scale, referred to as the Cantril Ladder.
• Typically, around 1,000 responses are gathered annually for each country and weights are used to construct representative national averages.
• Rankings are based on a three-year average of each population’s average assessment of their quality of life.
Key insights
• Heavy social media use appears to be contributing to the drop in wellbeing among young people in English-speaking countries and Western Europe, especially among girls.
• Life evaluations among under-25s in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have dropped dramatically (by almost one point on a 0-10 scale) over the past decade, while the average for the young in the rest of the world has increased.
• Young people who use social media for less than one hour per day report the highest levels of wellbeing — higher than those who do not use social media at all. But adolescents are, by one estimate,1 spending an average of 2.5 hours a day on social media.
• The 2026 rankings mark the second year in a row that none of the English-speaking countries, New Zealand (11th), Ireland (13th), Australia (15th), United States (23rd), Canada (25th), and the UK (29th) appear in the top 10, with only half in the top 20.
• In general, most Western industrial countries are now less happy than they were between 2005 and 2010.
• Nations in or near zones of major conflict remain at the foot of the rankings.
India ranked 116th out of 147 countries
• India ranked 116th overall, in terms of the overall ‘happiness ranking’, up from 118th in 2024 and 126th in 2023.
• In 2026, India ranked much better on several of the factors.
• 64th on perception of corruption (questions about prevalence of corruption).
• 78th on generosity (donation to charity).
• 61th on freedom (freedom to choose).
• 89th on GDP per capita (in terms of purchasing power parity).
• 95th on healthy life expectancy (based on data from WHO).
• 123rd on social support (who one can count in need).
International Day of Happiness
• The UN observes March 20 as the International Day of Happiness.
• It was first celebrated worldwide in 2013 following a resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly, which recognised happiness as a “fundamental human goal”.
• The resolution was initiated by Bhutan, a country which recognised the value of national happiness over national income since the early 1970s and famously adopted the goal of Gross National Happiness over Gross National Product.
• The UNGA proclaimed March 20 as the International Day of Happiness recognising the relevance of happiness and well-being as universal goals and aspirations in the lives of human beings around the world and the importance of their recognition in public policy objectives.