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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchFinland ranked first in the World Happiness Report 2024, with an average life-evaluation score of 7.741 out of 10. The top 20 list below ranks countries by residents’ average answers to a life-evaluation question in Gallup World Poll surveys collected from 2021 through 2023. “Happiest” here refers to that measure—not a claim that every resident is happy or that the ranking proves what caused a country’s score.
The 20 happiest countries in the 2024 report
The scores are three-year averages for 2021–2023, published in the 2024 edition. The ranking covers 143 countries. See the World Happiness Report 2024 for the full results.
| Rank | Country | Average life-evaluation score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Finland | 7.741 |
| 2 | Denmark | 7.583 |
| 3 | Iceland | 7.525 |
| 4 | Sweden | 7.344 |
| 5 | Israel | 7.341 |
| 6 | Netherlands | 7.319 |
| 7 | Norway | 7.302 |
| 8 | Luxembourg | 7.122 |
| 9 | Switzerland | 7.060 |
| 10 | Australia | 7.057 |
| 11 | New Zealand | 7.029 |
| 12 | Costa Rica | 6.955 |
| 13 | Kuwait | 6.951 |
| 14 | Austria | 6.905 |
| 15 | Canada | 6.900 |
| 16 | Belgium | 6.894 |
| 17 | Ireland | 6.838 |
| 18 | Czechia | 6.822 |
| 19 | Lithuania | 6.818 |
| 20 | United Kingdom | 6.749 |
What “happiest” means in this ranking
A self-assessment of life
The Gallup World Poll asks people to imagine a ladder numbered from 0, the worst possible life, to 10, the best possible life, and rate where they believe their life currently stands. The figures in the table are countries’ average responses across 2021, 2022, and 2023—not a count of how often people feel cheerful or a direct measure of daily mood. The report averages three years of responses to produce a more stable estimate. The World Happiness Report FAQ explains the measure.
What the six explanatory factors do—and do not—show
The report examines GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and freedom from corruption to help explain differences in life evaluations. These are explanatory correlates, not components in a formula that mechanically calculates each country’s rank. The report cautions that observed relationships do not, by themselves, establish that a factor caused a higher score. See the report’s methodology and results.
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How much to read into close positions
The table orders countries by their reported averages, but adjacent ranks should not be treated as definitive proof that one country’s residents evaluate their lives meaningfully better than another’s. The report provides 95% confidence intervals for both scores and ranks; rank intervals can be wider when samples are smaller or countries’ scores are close. For example, Sweden’s score of 7.344 is only 0.003 above Israel’s 7.341, while Australia’s 7.057 is 0.028 above New Zealand’s 7.029. Those small gaps make the confidence intervals important when interpreting the ordering, rather than the rank number alone.
What else the 2024 report found
Finland retained the overall lead
Finland ranked first for the seventh consecutive year in the 2024 report. The United States ranked 23rd, outside the top 20 for the first time in the report’s history, according to the report’s March 2024 release.
Leaders differ by age group
The 2024 edition included separate age-group rankings for the first time: Lithuania ranked highest for people under 30, while Denmark ranked highest among people aged 60 and older. Those results answer a different question from the overall country ranking, which combines life evaluations across age groups.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How to use this ranking
For a quick comparison, the scores show the average life evaluation reported for each country over a defined three-year period. They do not tell you how every person in a country feels, explain an individual’s financial or personal circumstances, or establish that a particular national policy produced the result. Treat this as a snapshot of reported evaluations in the 2021–2023 survey period, published in 2024—not as a live 2026 ranking. The United States’ position and the age-group results are also specific to that edition.
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John F. Helliwell, a founding editor of the report and emeritus professor of economics at the University of British Columbia, described Gallup World Poll surveys as “an unmatched source of data about the quality of lives all over the globe” in the report’s March 2024 release. The measure’s value is in comparing broad patterns in how people assess their lives, while keeping the limits of a country average in view.
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