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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, although another major global survey has produced a very different picture of where people feel happiest.
The 2026 World Happiness Report, published 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 how people evaluate their lives.
The ranking uses Gallup World Poll data collected between 2023 and 2025.
Finland once again topped the list, followed by Iceland, Denmark and Costa Rica.
However, the 2026 Ipsos Happiness Index, which surveyed 23,268 adults across 29 countries, found Indonesia had the highest proportion of people describing themselves as happy.
About 85% of Indonesians surveyed said they were “very happy” or “rather happy”, narrowly ahead of the Netherlands at 84%.
The global average across the 29 countries was 74%.
According to the World Happiness Report, the 14 highest-ranked countries in 2026 are:
Finland
Iceland
Denmark
Costa Rica
Sweden
Norway
Netherlands
Israel
Luxembourg
Switzerland
New Zealand
Mexico
Ireland
Belgium
Finland remains clearly at the top, while Iceland, Denmark and Costa Rica form a statistically close group immediately behind it.
Costa Rica’s fourth-place position is particularly notable as it represents the highest ranking ever achieved by a Latin American country.
The report also cautions against reading too much into small differences in ranking.
The countries in the top 20 are separated by less than one point on a 0-to-10 scale, meaning relatively small changes in average scores can move a country several places.
The World Happiness Report does not measure how often people smile, how cheerful they feel each day or whether they consider their country an enjoyable place to live.
Instead, it measures life evaluation — how people assess their lives overall.
Respondents are asked to place themselves on a ladder from zero to 10, with zero representing the worst possible life for them and 10 the best possible life.
Known as the Cantril Ladder, the measure is based on people’s own assessment rather than a score calculated from economic or social statistics.
The report uses factors including income, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity and perceptions of corruption to help explain differences between countries.
These factors, however, are not themselves added together to produce the rankings.
That means a country does not automatically rank highly simply because it is wealthy.
Countries with lower incomes can perform strongly when people report strong social connections, greater freedom and high overall satisfaction with their lives.
The Ipsos survey asks a different question.
Rather than asking people to assess their lives as a whole, it asks whether they consider themselves happy.
Indonesia came first, with 85% of respondents saying they were happy, followed by the Netherlands at 84%.
Happiness increased compared with the previous year in 25 of the 29 countries surveyed.
However, Ipsos also found that happiness remained below levels recorded 15 years ago in 15 of the 20 countries where long-term comparisons were available.
Feeling loved and appreciated was the factor most commonly associated with happiness, followed closely by relationships with family and children.
Financial circumstances, meanwhile, were identified as the biggest source of unhappiness.
The findings help explain why Indonesia can lead the Ipsos ranking while placing much lower in the World Happiness Report: the two surveys are measuring different aspects of wellbeing.
Gallup’s Global Emotions research looks at yet another dimension of happiness — how people actually felt the previous day.
Its Positive Experience Index considers whether people experienced emotions or experiences such as enjoyment, feeling well-rested, smiling or laughing, being treated with respect and learning something interesting.
The Negative Experience Index tracks emotions including worry, stress, sadness, anger and physical pain.
This approach can produce a very different picture from a life-satisfaction ranking.
Someone may consider their overall life highly satisfying while having had an exhausting or stressful day.
Conversely, a person may have enjoyed a particular day despite being unhappy with their broader circumstances.
The 2026 World Happiness Report also points to improving life satisfaction across Europe.
Since 2006-2010, 79 countries have seen significant gains in how people rate their lives, with some of the biggest improvements recorded in Central and Eastern Europe.
The report also finds that the world’s highest-ranked countries are relatively close together in their overall scores.
Recent Gallup research suggests that people who view their communities as welcoming and accepting tend to report higher life evaluations, more positive experiences and fewer negative emotions, although Gallup cautions that this relationship does not establish cause and effect.
The contrasting rankings underline that there is no single way to measure happiness.
If people are asked to assess how well their lives are going overall, Finland remains the world’s top performer.
If they are asked whether they feel happy, Indonesia leads the latest Ipsos survey.
And if they are asked about their emotions and experiences on the previous day, Gallup’s findings offer yet another picture.
The results are not necessarily contradictory. Rather, they show that happiness can mean different things.
The World Happiness Report asks people to evaluate their lives and how they feel about it, and how satisfied they are as a whole.
Other surveys also take into account how people feel and whether they are happy currently.
The survey findings suggest that wellbeing is about more than simply feeling happy all the time.
Wellbeing also depends on how one feels about whether life is heading in the right direction, having strong relationships and people to lean on, and having the freedom to make choices that truly matter.
Finland’s nine-year reign, therefore, does not necessarily mean Finns are happier every day than everyone else.
It means that when people are asked to step back and assess their lives as a whole, Finland continues to produce one of the world’s strongest answers.
