These are the top 10 happiest countries, according to the 2025 World Happiness Report. Did the United States make the cut?

The results are in for the 2025 World Happiness Report, and yet again Nordic countries top the list in self-reported well-being. While this year’s report, which focuses on “the impact of caring and sharing on people’s happiness,” has some bad news for the United States and about increasing loneliness worldwide, it also includes some interesting takeaways on aspects that can boost or diminish life satisfaction — from the benefits of dining with others to a happy household size. Here’s what we learned.

Finland is the world’s happiest country (again). Here are the top 10.

Finland is the happiest country in the world for the eighth year in a row, with Finns reporting an average life satisfaction score of 7.74 out of 10. Nordic countries once again lead the world in happiness, but the top 10 list also sees some newcomers — with Costa Rica (6th) and Mexico (10th) entering the top 10 for the first time.

1. Finland

2. Denmark

3. Iceland

4. Sweden

5. Netherlands

6. Costa Rica

7. Norway

8. Israel

9. Luxembourg

10. Mexico

The World Happiness Report ranks countries using data from the Gallup World Poll, which asks respondents to evaluate their life as a whole on a scale of 0 to 10 — with the best possible life as a 10 and the worst as a 0. They gather about 1,000 responses from each country every year, which are then weighted to give population-representative national averages. To determine each country’s annual happiness ranking, researchers then use an average of three years’ worth of data; so the 2025 report uses survey data from 2022-24.

The three-year average, as well as when countries are surveyed, can mute the effect of “cataclysmic events.” For example, as last year’s Happiness Report explains, Israel’s survey for the 2024 report took place after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel but “before much of the subsequent warfare.” Israel ranked No. 5 in happiness in 2024, and fell to No. 8 in 2025.

Afghanistan is the world’s unhappiest country

For the sixth consecutive year, Afghanistan ranks last in happiness, with an average happiness score of 1.36 out of 10. Women in Afghanistan score even lower, with an average happiness of 1.16 out of 10. These are the 10 countries that ranked at the bottom for self-reported well-being.

138. Lesotho

139. Comoros

140. Yemen

141. DR Congo

142. Botswana

143. Zimbabwe

144. Malawi

145. Lebanon

146. Sierra Leone

147. Afghanistan

Happiness rankings are based on individuals’ assessments of their own lives, but researchers also look at six areas to help contextualize that data and understand why some countries score higher than others, including: GDP (gross domestic product) per capita, healthy life expectancy, social support or “having someone to count on,” freedom “to make key life decisions,” generosity and “perceptions of corruption in government and business.” The report notes that individual life evaluations are especially low in countries “racked by violence,” such as Afghanistan and Lebanon, while some countries, such as Sudan and Syria, aren’t even in the rankings because “conditions have been too unsafe to permit surveys.”

The U.S. falls to its lowest happiness ranking ever

With an average score of 6.72 out of 10, the United States falls to No. 24 in happiness — its lowest position ever. The U.S. peaked at 11th place in 2012, which was the first year the World Happiness Report was published.

Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, a professor of economics at the University of Oxford and an editor of the World Happiness Report, tells Yahoo Life that the U.S.'s continual decline in happiness ranking is "in no small part driven by the precipitous drops in how young people rate the quality of their lives." Last year, when the U.S dropped from No. 15 in 2023 to No. 23 in 2024, falling out of the top 20 for the first time, that decline was in large part driven by unhappiness among Americans under age 30.

This year's report finds that, in general, Western industrial countries are less happy now than they were between 2005 and 2010; since then, the U.S. and two other Western countries (Switzerland and Canada) have had the biggest shifts, with drops of more than 0.5 points on the 0 to 10 happiness scale.

And while “deaths of despair” (i.e., preventable deaths due to suicide, alcohol abuse or drug overdose) have been declining in many countries since 2000, they are high and rising in the U.S., which has been experiencing an average annual increase of 1.3 deaths of despair per 100,000 people since 2000.

Americans are spending more time eating alone — which is linked to less happiness.

As part of the 2025 report’s theme on how caring and sharing impact happiness, researchers also looked at how sharing meals versus eating alone can influence well-being. They found that across all ages, genders and countries, people who eat with others “report significantly higher levels of life satisfaction.” Countries where people share more meals tend to have “higher levels of social support and lower levels of loneliness.”

The report's authors say that sharing just one more meal per week is associated with an average increase of about 0.2 points on the 0 to 10 global happiness scale — or about the equivalent of five spots on the global happiness ranking.

People who share more meals report not only “more positive emotions overall, but they also seem to enjoy their food more,” with a positive correlation between meals shared and reported enjoyment of both cooking and eating.

But while some countries share almost all of their meals, others report eating almost entirely alone — and in the U.S., the number of people eating alone is growing, with rates of people dining alone having increased even before the COVID pandemic. Using data from the American Time Use Survey, researchers found that in 2023, about one in four American adults (26%) say they ate all of their meals alone the previous day — an increase of 53% since 2003 — with the report authors theorizing that “the increasing number of people who eat alone is one reason for declining well-being in the United States.”

When researchers compare the average levels of daily emotions of Americans who shared at least one meal versus Americans who ate all their meals alone, they find that those who dine with others experience more happiness and less sadness, pain and stress.

A household size of 4 or 5 people is the sweet spot for happiness

Using data from the 2020 European Social Survey and from Mexico’s 2021 National Survey of Self-reported Well-being (ENBIARE), researchers looked at how household size impacts people’s happiness. In both Mexico (where the average household size is 3.5 people) and Europe (where the average household size is 2.5 people), the highest average life satisfaction is reported by those living in households with four or five people. Researchers also noticed an “inverted U-shape” in reported life satisfaction and household size — with people in single-person households and in households with six to seven people reporting the lowest happiness levels.

The happiness report authors theorize that happiness with “interpersonal relationships” and economic well-being may be reasons for this inverted U-shape: Small and single-person households report higher levels of economic satisfaction on average, and larger households report lower economic satisfaction (likely, the report authors say, because material resources are spread thinner among more household members). However, small households “report lower satisfaction with their interpersonal relationships” than larger households.

They also find that household configuration impacts happiness. Two-parent households report higher levels of life satisfaction, while single-person and single-parent households tend to report lower levels of life satisfaction. However, researchers also find that “the presence of additional family members in single-parent households appears to mitigate some of the negative effects of single-parenthood on happiness.”

More young people say they have no one they can count on for social support

Researchers also see increased loneliness among young adults (who they define as individuals ages 19 to 29). Using Gallup World Poll data of 168 countries, they found that in 2023, 19% of young people worldwide reported having “no one they could count on for social support” — a 39% increase compared with 2006. In fact, every year 1.7 million more young adults worldwide report having no one they can count on.

Lara Aknin, a psychology professor at Simon Fraser University and an editor of the World Happiness Report, tells Yahoo Life it's "striking" that so many young people have no one to turn to in times of need — which many people would consider "the bare minimum of social connection."

Young people in North America and Western Europe now report the lowest well-being among all age groups. And while the COVID pandemic exacerbated loneliness among young adults in particular (who reported greater feelings of loneliness compared with other age groups), the report authors observe that since the pandemic, young adult loneliness still hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels.

People are generally kinder than we give them credit for

One bright spot is that people are generally much more benevolent than we give them credit for.

To study generosity (and how accurately we perceive it), Happiness Report researchers looked at various “lost wallet” experiments around the world — where wallets were “dropped” to see how many would be returned — and compared the number of wallets returned with surveys asking people in those countries whether they expected that a lost wallet would be given back to its owner. In Toronto, the expected rate of return was just 23%, but the actual number of returned wallets was more than 80%. Another study of 40 countries showed the rate of wallet returns was 1.8 times higher than people surveyed had expected, while another wallet test in North American cities found that two-thirds of 200 wallets were returned — double the amount of wallets expected by U.S. respondents.

“Collectively,” the Happiness Report authors say, “these data on expected and actual wallet return show that people are far too pessimistic about the benevolence of others.”