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Once upon a time,

Canada the happiest G7 country

However, Canada’s global ranking for happiness is slipping… Big time.

Canada drops to 18th in 2025 World Happiness Report rank, among the ‘largest losers’

Canada has slipped to 18th place in the global World Happiness Report, down three spots from last year and placing it among the “largest losers” in happiness rankings over the last two decades, according to the annual report released Thursday.

At its peak, in the 2015 report, Canada had placed fifth. Now, in 18th, Canada has dropped to its lowest-ever position since the polling began in 2005. The United States has also dropped to its lowest-ever position at 24th, having previously peaked at 11th place in 2012. The U.K. fell to 23rd.

Finland once again came out on top, named the happiest country in the world for the eighth year in a row in the annual report published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford.

“In general, the Western industrial countries are now less happy than they were between 2005 and 2010,” notes the report. “In 2013, the top ten countries were all western industrial countries but now only seven are.”

While the country rankings are based on asking people to rate their own lives, the authors use six variables to help explain the variation between counties: Having someone to count on, GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and perceptions of corruption.

Canada ranked 15th and 16th globally for perceptions of corruption and GDP, respectively, but 35th for social support and 68th for freedom to make life choices. About 18 per cent  of Canadians in the report said they were dissatisfied with their freedom to choose what they do with their lives.

There’s a tendency for people to think of happiness as a personal issue, and a person’s own responsibility, but researchers believe that’s not always the case, said Felix Cheung, a Canada Research Chair in population well-being and assistant professor in the department of psychology at the University of Toronto.

“When one person is unhappy, that’s an individual issue,” said Cheung, who is also a co-author of the World Happiness Report as well as the 2024 Canadian Happiness Report.

“But when a country is unhappy, this is a structural issue, and a structural issue requires a structural problem.”

A downward trend

This year’s decline is a continuation of a downward trend for Canadians. The 2024 Canadian Happiness Report, for instance, found that Canadians’ assessment of their quality of lives has steadily declined over the last decade — driven largely by Canadians under age 30.

And disadvantaged groups experience lower life satisfaction. The least satisfied groups in the Canadian Happiness Report included members of the 2SLGBTQI+ community, people with low income, and First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people. Canadians with poor mental health were the least satisfied with their lives.

So while overall happiness has dropped, it tends to be concentrated within certain groups, which is concerning, explains Cheung. He believes investing in youth mental health could be Canada’s “best bet” to improve.

There has been a shift in what it means to be a young person in Canada, Cheung said, citing housing affordability and a a sense of uncertainty as broader social trends that started long before COVID, when one might assume happiness started declining.

“They feel that working hard doesn’t necessarily allow them to move up that social ladder. And that is something we need to pay attention to.”

What makes people happy?

Pulling in data from thousands of Gallup survey responses across 147 countries and regions, the report’s rankings were based on how people in the country rated their own life and circumstances, averaged over three years and supported by economic and psychological analysis from experts. Key factors included per-capita GDP, health and life expectancy, social connections and perceptions about their country.

“Happiness isn’t just about wealth or growth — it’s about trust, connection and knowing people have your back,” Jon Clifton, the CEO of Gallup, told The Associated Press. “If we want stronger communities and economies, we must invest in what truly matters: each other.”

Canada’s lost decade: Real GDP per capita grew by only 1.4% from 2015-2024

In the new World Happiness Report, Canada’s economy played a large role in its ranking, but human connections mattered, too.

Researchers say that beyond health and wealth, some factors that influence happiness sound deceptively simple: sharing meals with others, having somebody to count on for social support, and household size. In the U.S., for example, more and people tend to eat lunches and dinners alone. This is especially true for younger people.

The U.S. ranked 69th for meal-sharing, but Canada didn’t come out much better at 53rd, or an average of 8.4 meals shared per week. Researchers linked sharing meals with wellbeing.

Believing in the kindness of others is also much more closely tied to happiness than previously thought, according to the latest findings. And people are also more helpful than we think they are.

As an example, the report suggests that people who believe that others are willing to return their lost wallet is a strong predictor of the overall happiness of a population. And actual rates of wallet return are around twice as high as people expect.

One of the studies researchers looked at happened in Toronto, by comparing experimentally dropped wallets with large samples of answers from Toronto respondents to the Canadian General Social Survey, according to the report.

The expected rate of return was 23 per cent. The actual return was over 80 per cent.

“People are much too pessimistic about the benevolence of others,” notes the report.

Large Homeless camp in Vancouver, Canada

As loneliness and pessimism take root around the world, a new report has found that Canada’s global ranking for happiness is slipping.

Canada ranked as the 18th happiest country in the world last year, according to the 2025 World Happiness Report, down from 15th in 2023 and fifth in 2011. That drop coincided with a significant decrease in self-reported quality of life among surveyed Canadians, to roughly 6.8 out of 10 in 2024 from 7.5, 13 years earlier.

Pulling in data from thousands of Gallup survey responses across 147 countries and regions, the report’s rankings were based on how people in the country rated their own life and circumstances, averaged over three years and supported by economic and psychological analysis from experts. Key factors included per-capita GDP, health and life expectancy, social connections and perceptions about their country.

“Happiness isn’t just about wealth or growth — it’s about trust, connection and knowing people have your back,” Jon Clifton, the CEO of Gallup, told The Associated Press. “If we want stronger communities and economies, we must invest in what truly matters: each other.”

Homelessness in Vancouver

Following this year’s theme of “caring and sharing,” among the report’s key findings were widespread pessimism “about the benevolence of others.” The report cited studies where researchers dropped wallets on the street in cities around the world and found that people were far more likely to return the wallets than expected among those surveyed.

Learning that fact – that the world is kinder than you expect – can be helpful on its own, the report says.

“There is a wealth of evidence about the extent of caring behaviour around the world,” the report reads. “Our wellbeing depends on our perceptions of others’ benevolence, as well as their actual benevolence. Since we underestimate the kindness of others, our wellbeing can be improved by receiving information about their true benevolence.”

Loneliness was another challenge identified in the research, especially among young people. Researchers found in some regions that larger households of four to five people were associated with the most happiness, but that as recently as 2023, 19 per cent of young adults globally said they had “no one they could count on for social support,” up nearly 40 per cent from 2006.

Gestures as simple as sharing a meal were associated with lower levels of loneliness, and could potentially contribute to well-being overall, the research showed.

The rankings

Leading the pack this past year with a score of 7.74 was Finland, which has ranked the highest in reports since 2017. Also in the top 10 are Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, Norway, Israel, Luxembourg and Mexico.

Among G7 countries, Canada leads in happiness, followed by Germany (6.75), the United Kingdom (6.73), United States (6.72), France (6.59), Italy (6.42) and Japan (6.15).

“In general, the western industrial countries are now less happy than they were between 2005 and 2010,” the 2025 report reads. “Three western countries had drops exceeding 0.5 on the 0–10 scale (the United States, Switzerland, and Canada) putting them among the fifteen largest losers.”

In descending order, the countries ranked lowest for happiness in the most recent data include Lebanon, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan.

You can view the full list of rankings and scores in the table below:

Not 52st