Finland Remains on Top as World’s Happiness Country
When the World Happiness Report was released on March 20, 2025, it was no surprise that Finland came out on top, again. In fact, it is the eighth year in a row that Finland has been number one. CNBC reported that the other Scandinavian countries are also in the top 10 with Denmark in second place.
“Finland is an extraordinary outlier, and I think the world is really focused on understanding what is unique about Finland,” Ilana Ron Levey, managing director at Gallup told CNBC.
That’s because, according to Ron Levey, “[There’s] a belief in others, optimism for the future, trust in institutions, and support from friends and family as reasons why Finnish people are happier than most.”
While there were no surprises in the ranking, this is the second year in a row that the US failed to make the top 10, coming in at number 24. Israel still made the top 10 despite being at war for the last year and a half.
What is the World Happiness Report?
The UN launched the World Happiness report in 2012 as a way to find out what makes people happy and what policies can be adopted by countries to increase wellbeing. It is always published on World Happiness Day (March 20), reported CNN.
The report – which is a collaboration between Gallup, the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network – uses Gallup World Poll data collected from people in 140 countries. The survey uses the Cantril ladder system in rating 0-10 and asks participants to report on six variables: social support, life expectancy, freedom, amount of corruption, and generosity.
Every year, the team explores the relationship between happiness, wellbeing, and a chosen theme. The 2025 theme was caring and sharing.
“Happiness is so much more about trust, social connections, relationships and all these different dimensions and not just GDP or higher salaries,” Ron Levey told CNBC. “What really distinguishes the happiest countries are trusting strong relationships, optimism for the future, acts of generosity, and just fundamentally believing in others’ goodwill.”
Measuring Caring
To measure how caring and kind people around the globe are, the report investigated this by seeing how many people returned wallets that were deliberately “lost” by strangers, reported BBC.
It turns out that the rate of wallets returned was almost twice as high as the researchers thought it would be. The report concluded that belief in kindness of others is more tied to happiness than previously believed.
John F. Helliwell, an economist at the University of British Columbia and a founding editor of the report, told BBC, “The wallet experiment data showed people are much happier living where they think people care about each other.”
