Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 33468644.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1073/pnas.2016976118 and PMC identifier 7848527.
- Licence recorded as CC BY-NC-ND.
- Because redistribution is not established, this page shows the abstract only. Follow the links below for the full text.
Abstract
What is the relationship between money and well-being? Research distinguishes between two forms of well-being: people's feelings during the moments of life (experienced well-being) and people's evaluation of their lives when they pause and reflect (evaluative well-being). Drawing on 1,725,994 experience-sampling reports from 33,391 employed US adults, the present results show that both experienced and evaluative well-being increased linearly with log(income), with an equally steep slope for higher earners as for lower earners. There was no evidence for an experienced well-being plateau above $75,000/y, contrary to some influential past research. There was also no evidence of an income threshold at which experienced and evaluative well-being diverged, suggesting that higher incomes are associated with both feeling better day-to-day and being more satisfied with life overall.