Happiness in the World Happiness Report 2026

While happiness itself can feel nearly impossible to measure numerically, the annual World Happiness Report remains the closest and most trusted resource for data-focused people hoping to quantify global well-being. Produced each year by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, the report pulls data from Gallup surveys to rank every country worldwide based on residents’ self-reported life satisfaction.

For the second consecutive year, no English-speaking country has earned a spot in the report’s top 10 happiest nations. Pinpointing an exact cause for this pattern is difficult, but this year’s lead researchers have identified one major factor that likely contributes to the trend.

True to long-standing patterns, Nordic countries still dominate the top 10 rankings. Finland has held the number one position for nine years in a row, and Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway also claim spots in the top 10, solidifying Northern Europe’s reputation as the happiest region on the globe. In a notable new shift this year, Costa Rica climbed into the top 5 for the first time, taking fourth place. Meanwhile, the United States falls at 23rd in the global rankings.

Over the past decade, self-reported happiness among people under 25 in English-speaking nations and Western Europe has dropped steadily. On the report’s standard 0 to 10 life satisfaction scale, average scores for this age group have fallen by nearly a full point.

While hundreds of unique factors shape overall population happiness, the leaders of this year’s World Happiness Report name one key driver of declining life satisfaction: excessive social media use. The report notes that social media overuse is especially alarming for teenagers, citing research from the Programme for International Student Assessment that surveyed 15-year-old students across 47 countries. The study confirmed that teens who used social media for more than seven hours a day reported significantly lower well-being than their peers who used these platforms for less than one hour daily.