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Finland has retained its position as the world’s happiest country for a ninth consecutive year, according to the 2026 World Happiness Report, while Indonesia ranked first in a separate survey measuring how many people say they are happy.
The World Happiness Report, produced by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford in partnership with Gallup and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, ranks 147 countries based on people’s assessments of their own lives.
The 2026 ranking uses Gallup World Poll data collected from 2023 to 2025. Finland remained at the top, followed by Iceland, Denmark and Costa Rica.
The top 14 countries in the World Happiness Report are:
The report measures life evaluation, rather than how frequently people experience positive emotions. Respondents rate their lives on a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 representing the worst possible life and 10 the best possible life.
The ranking is based on national averages of those assessments. Income, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity and perceptions of corruption are used to help explain differences between countries. Still, they are not directly added together to produce the ranking.
Costa Rica’s fourth-place ranking is its highest position in the report and the highest ever achieved by a Latin American country.
A separate 2026 Happiness Index by Ipsos produced a different result.
The survey, covering 29 countries and 23,268 adults, found that 85% of Indonesians said they were “very happy” or “rather happy”, the highest share among the countries surveyed.
The Netherlands and Mexico followed at 84%, Colombia at 83%, and Malaysia and Thailand at 81%.
The survey was conducted from December 24, 2025, to January 9, 2026, and the average across the 29 countries was 74%.
Ipsos found that feeling appreciated or loved was the most commonly cited contributor to happiness, followed by relationships with family and children.
Financial circumstances were the leading reported source of unhappiness.
The two surveys measure different aspects of well-being.
The World Happiness Report asks people to assess how their lives are going overall, while Ipsos asks whether people consider themselves happy.
Gallup’s Global Emotions research takes another approach by examining whether people experienced positive or negative emotions on the previous day.
As a result, a person can be satisfied with their life overall while still having a stressful day, or feel happy on a particular day while being less satisfied with their broader circumstances.
The different results show that there is no single measure of happiness. Finland leads when people are asked to evaluate their lives as a whole, while Indonesia ranks highest when people are asked whether they feel happy.
