The World Happiness Report 2026, published Thursday by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, ranked Finland as the world’s happiest country for the ninth year in a row and highlighted a parallel trend involving young people’s mental well-being and social media use. In its findings on life evaluation—survey participants rating their own lives on a 0-to-10 scale—the report tied heavy social media use to lower well-being for young people, with its strongest concern centered on teenage girls in English-speaking countries and Western Europe.
The report also placed new emphasis on how online environments may shape outcomes for adolescents. It said the links between social media use and well-being can look different across regions, and that in some places youth well-being has not fallen even with heavy social media use. Still, the report concluded that heavy social media use in some countries is an important contributing factor in the decline in youth well-being it documented.
Oxford’s Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, who directs the Wellbeing Research Centre and co-edits the report, pointed to differences in social life and stability as a possible explanation for shifts in how young people experience online life. He said, “We think it’s because of the quality of their social lives and the stability that they currently enjoy,” and added, “Latin America more generally has strong family ties, strong social ties, a great level of social capital, as a sociologist would call it, more so than in other places.”
On the ranking itself, Finland led for the ninth straight year, with other Nordic countries continuing near the top. The report placed Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway among the top 10 countries, and it said its assessment reflected a mix of factors that included wealth, how evenly it is distributed, and the role of a welfare state in protecting people from recession risks, alongside healthy life expectancy. Afghanistan ranked as the unhappiest country again, followed by Sierra Leone and Malawi.
Costa Rica moved into the top five this year, jumping to fourth place after climbing from 23rd in 2023. The report attributed the increase to well-being boosts it linked to family bonds and other social connections. It said Finland’s steady position and those of other Northern European countries remained tied to that combination of economic security, social protections, and health indicators.
When it turned to young people and social media, the report said that among under-25s in English-speaking and Western European countries, life satisfaction dropped by almost one point over the past decade. It highlighted that the decline is most concerning among teenage girls and cited an example: it said that 15-year-old girls who use social media for five hours or more reported a drop in life satisfaction compared with girls who use it less.
The report also described what it called a clearer relationship at lower levels of use. It said young people who use social media for less than one hour per day reported the highest levels of well-being, higher than those who do not use social media at all. At the same time, it said adolescents spend an estimated average of 2.5 hours a day on social media, placing many users above the level associated in the report with the highest well-being.
De Neve also urged renewed attention to the “social” part of social media. He said, “It is clear that we should look as much as possible to put the ‘social’ back into social media,” in comments carried in the report’s coverage.
The report pointed to the design of platforms as a potential factor. It said the most problematic platforms are those with algorithmic feeds, feature influencers and where the main material is visual, because it said they encourage social comparisons. By contrast, it said those who use platforms that mainly facilitate communication do better.
The rankings underscored the contrast between countries leading overall life satisfaction and those with less positive results for specific youth groups. The report said the 2026 rankings marked the second year in a row that no English-speaking country appeared in the top 10, placing the United States at 23rd, Canada at 25th and Britain at 29th. It also said the report’s focus on social media comes as more countries have banned or are considering bans of social media for minors.
Finland’s president responded to the ranking with a statement emphasizing the absence of any “magic potion.” Alexander Stubb reacted Thursday to Finland being in first place again, saying, “I do not think there is a magic potion, but it helps to have a society which strives towards freedom, equality and justice.” A pensioner in Helsinki, Semi Salmi, echoed that view while pointing to the value he associated with access to health care, saying his father was in long-term care and “he’s extremely well taken care of by the system.”
The report said its country rankings were based on responses from around 100,000 people in 140 countries and territories. It said the study was conducted in partnership with Gallup and the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, using telephone or face-to-face interviews in most countries, with approximately 1,000 people contacted each year.