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Data

Self-reported life satisfaction

See all data and research on:
Happiness & Life Satisfaction

What you should know about this indicator

  • The Cantril ladder asks respondents to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10 and the worst possible life being a 0. They are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale.
  • The rankings are calculated by the World Happiness Report based on nationally representative samples collected by the Gallup World Poll.
  • The score is the average of the three-year survey period, i.e. the year 2025 shows the average of the 2023-2025 survey data.
  • The number of people and countries surveyed varies year to year, but typically more than 100,000 people in over 140 countries participate in the Gallup World Poll each year.
  • The rankings are based entirely on the survey scores, which are weighted by Gallup to make the estimates representative.
Self-reported life satisfaction
Average of survey responses. The survey question asks respondents their current position on a hypothetical , where the best possible life for them is a 10, and the worst possible life is a 0.
Source
Wellbeing Research Centre (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
March 16, 2026
Next expected update
March 2027
Date range
2011–2025

Related research and writing

A dark blue background with a lighter blue world map superimposed over it. Yellow text that says Happiness and Life Satisfaction by Our World in Data

Happiness and Life Satisfaction

Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, Tuna Acisu, and Max Roser
A dark blue background with a lighter blue world map superimposed over it. Yellow text that says Happiness and Life Satisfaction by Our World in Data

Bonheur et satisfaction

Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser

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Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Wellbeing Research Centre – World Happiness Report

The World Happiness Report is a partnership of Gallup, the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and the WHR’s Editorial Board.

It reviews the state of happiness in the world today and shows how the science of happiness explains personal and national variations in happiness.

Retrieved on
March 16, 2026
Retrieved from
ttps://worldhappiness.report/ed/2026/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Helliwell, J. F., Layard, R., Sachs, J. D., De Neve, J.-E., Aknin, L. B., & Wang, S. (Eds.). (2026).
World Happiness Report 2026. University of Oxford: Wellbeing Research Centre.

The World Happiness Report is a partnership of Gallup, the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and the WHR’s Editorial Board.

It reviews the state of happiness in the world today and shows how the science of happiness explains personal and national variations in happiness.

Retrieved on
March 16, 2026
Retrieved from
ttps://worldhappiness.report/ed/2026/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Helliwell, J. F., Layard, R., Sachs, J. D., De Neve, J.-E., Aknin, L. B., & Wang, S. (Eds.). (2026).
World Happiness Report 2026. University of Oxford: Wellbeing Research Centre.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

We calculated the average of regions by taking a population-weighted average over all countries within that region.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Self-reported life satisfaction”, part of the following publication: Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, Tuna Acisu, and Max Roser (2017) - “Happiness and Life Satisfaction”. Data adapted from Wellbeing Research Centre. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260319-160338/grapher/happiness-cantril-ladder.html [online resource] (archived on March 19, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Wellbeing Research Centre (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Wellbeing Research Centre (2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Self-reported life satisfaction” [dataset]. Wellbeing Research Centre, “World Happiness Report 2026” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260319-160338/grapher/happiness-cantril-ladder.html (archived on March 19, 2026).

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Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/happiness-cantril-ladder.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/happiness-cantril-ladder.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/happiness-cantril-ladder.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/happiness-cantril-ladder.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/happiness-cantril-ladder.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/happiness-cantril-ladder.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/happiness-cantril-ladder.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/happiness-cantril-ladder.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear