Six European countries made it into the top 10, but the findings come with a warning: young people’s happiness across the world is being hindered by social media.
Finland tops the rankings as the world's happiest country for the ninth year in a row, followed by Iceland, Denmark, and Costa Rica, according to the World Happiness Report 2026.
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Sweden and Norway complete the top six, followed by the Netherlands, Israel, Luxembourg, and Switzerland in the top 10.
Costa Rica’s rise to fourth place marks the highest ever ranking for a Latin American country.
For the second year in a row, no English-speaking country has made the top 10. The highest scoring one is New Zealand at 11th, followed by Ireland at 13th and Australia at 15th.
Kosovo, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic have joined the top 20.
In general, most Western industrial countries are now less happy than they were between 2005 and 2010, with negative emotions becoming more common in all global regions, the report found.
Europe is becoming more equal in happiness, with Central and Eastern European countries closing the gap. But young people in Western Europe, the United Kingdom, and Ireland report lower well-being both overall and compared to older generations.
Most of the countries showing the largest gains in life evaluations since 2006–2010 are in Central and Eastern Europe, including Serbia, Bulgaria, Latvia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The rankings are based on a three-year average of each population’s assessment of their quality of life.
Experts then seek to account for the variations across countries and over time using factors such as GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, having someone to count on, a sense of freedom, generosity, and perceptions of corruption.
“When it comes to happiness, building what is good in life is more important than finding and fixing what is bad. Both need doing, now more than ever,” John F. Helliwell, emeritus professor of economics at the University of British Columbia and a founding editor of the World Happiness Report, said.
Happiness among young people
Young people in North America and Western Europe are much less happy than they were 15 years ago, the authors found.
In a ranking of happiness changes for under-25s, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand rank between 122 and 133 in the list of 136 countries.
While positive emotions continue to be twice as frequent as negative ones, worry rose more broadly for the young.
What drives unhappiness?
The report points to social media as one of the main drivers of unhappiness among young people.
“The global evidence makes clear that the links between social media use and our wellbeing heavily depend on what platforms we’re using, who’s using them and how, as well as for how long,” said Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, director of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre, professor of Economics at the University of Oxford, and an editor of the World Happiness Report.
He added that heavy usage is associated with much lower well-being, but that those who deliberately opt out of social media also appear to be missing out on some positive effects.
“Beyond the complexity, it is clear that we should look as much as possible to put the ‘social’ back into social media,” De Neve said.
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.
The authors noted that social media is harming adolescents at a scale large enough to cause changes at the population level
“We show there is now overwhelming evidence of severe and widespread direct harms, such as cyberbullying and sextortion, and compelling evidence of troubling indirect harms such as depression,” they wrote.
The report also found that the type of social media platforms young people use makes a difference.
Platforms designed to facilitate social connections show a clear positive association with happiness, while those driven by algorithms tend to demonstrate a negative association at high rates of use, the authors found.
“Our point is that the direct harms from social media are not just occasional events or freak accidents that are happening to a few hundred adolescents each year,” the authors wrote.
They added that there are so many different kinds of harm happening to adolescents who use social media for several hours every day that the number of victims likely exceeds ten million each year in the United States alone.
“The digital age is reshaping the social and emotional foundations of wellbeing in Europe,” Zeynep Ozkok, co-author of the study at St. Francis Xavier University in Canada, said.
She added that the effects are neither uniform nor inevitable: they depend on who you are, the social world you inhabit, and the digital environment surrounding you.
“Understanding these interactions is essential for developing policies that support wellbeing in an increasingly online society,” Ozkok noted.
