Data Mechanics

Life satisfaction

How people rate their own lives, from 0 (worst possible) to 10 (best possible).

Life satisfaction is the average answer to one survey question: imagine a ladder where 10 is the best possible life for you and 0 the worst; on which step do you stand now? Gallup asks it in its World Poll, usually of about 1,000 people per country a year, and the World Happiness Report publishes the results from the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford. Our World in Data republishes them.

World map · Life satisfaction (0 to 10)

Source: Wellbeing Research Centre (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data (updated 2026-03-16) · fetched 26 Oct 2026

Over time · Life satisfaction (0 to 10)

Source: Wellbeing Research Centre (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data (updated 2026-03-16) · fetched 26 Oct 2026

Years
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Every country and year, with the source on each row.

Portrait of Klaus Jürgen Folz

About the author

Hello there, I’m Klaus Jürgen Folz. I studied Mechanical Engineering at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil, and I work in Austria as a lead Python and Power BI developer. I built Data Mechanics because good decisions start with facts. Public data is often scattered, hard to find or locked behind paywalls, and too much of what we read about the world is biased. Here, every number is shown as it was published, next to its source, so anyone can check it, compare countries and leaders, and draw their own conclusions.

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