Netherlands drops to 7th place in 2026 World Happiness Report; Lowest position yet

The Netherlands is the seventh-happiest country in the world, according to the annual World Happiness Report. Seventh place is the Netherlands’ lowest position yet. In last year’s ranking, our country was in fifth place, after dipping out of the top five the year before.

The top spot on the list was again Finland, followed by Iceland, Denmark, and Costa Rica with extremely close scores. Likewise, Sweden and Norway barely pipped the Netherlands for fifth and sixth place, respectively.

That means the Netherlands ranked seventh globally, sixth in Europe, and first in the Western Europe category, including Austria (19), Belgium (14), France (35), Germany (17), and Luxembourg (9). Aside from Costa Rica, the only country from outside Europe to crack the top ten was Israel, in eighth place. Switzerland took the tenth position.

For this report, researchers from Gallup, the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre, and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network surveyed people on their life satisfaction and looked at factors that impact well-being, like the gross national product per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity, and corruption in a country. They also looked at the level of benevolence in a country - how many people donate to charities, volunteer, or help strangers, for example.

Residents of the Netherlands scored their life an average of 7.141 out of 10 last year. The Netherlands ranked high in GDP per capita and generosity, with 67 percent of Dutch people indicating that they donate to charity.

The researchers also looked into the relationship between problematic social media use (PMSU) and psychological complaints among adolescents. They found that an increase in PMSU leads to an increase in psychological complaints across the adolescent age groups, but younger teens “appear to be more vulnerable to the negative well-being consequences of problematic digital engagement.”

The study notes that different countries link teenagers’ mental health problems and social media use to different extents, but the Netherlands is among the countries where the negative association with PSMU is strongest.