World Happiness results
The 2026 World Happiness Report landed this week and named Finland the world’s happiest country for the ninth straight year. (smithsonianmag.com) The U.S. climbed to 23rd overall and the report flagged heavy social-media use as a major negative driver of youth wellbeing. ( )
The 2026 edition was released March 19, 2026 by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford in partnership with Gallup and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and lists John F. Helliwell, Richard Layard and Jeffrey D. Sachs among its editors. (worldhappiness.report) Finland’s life-evaluation score in the report is 7.764 out of 10, while Costa Rica recorded its best-ever placement at 4th overall after rising from 23rd in 2023. (finland.fi) The United States moved up one slot to 23rd in 2026 from 24th in 2025, marking a third consecutive report with the country outside the top 20 and continuing a long-term slide from a peak of 11th in 2011. (newsweek.com) The report highlights a near one-point decline in life-evaluation scores (0–10 scale) among under-25s in the NANZ grouping—United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand—compared with a decade earlier. (unsdsn.org) Analyses drawn from the OECD PISA 2022 dataset (over 270,000 15–16-year-olds in 47 countries) show adolescents who report seven or more hours a day on social media have life-satisfaction scores about 0.5–1.0 points lower than light users, with the largest negative gaps concentrated among girls. (files.worldhappiness.report) At the city level, only 16 U.S. metropolitan areas made the separate Happy City Index this year (down from 18 in 2025), with San Francisco the highest-ranked U.S. metro at No. 45 globally. (thehill.com)
