Which countries are the happiest in the world?

Finland has done it again, and has been ranked as the world's happiest country for the ninth time in a row.

Every year, the University of Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre works together with groups including the United Nations (UN) to make the World Happiness Report.

The report uses lots of data to rank the countries, including a poll that asks people around the world to think of how fulfilled their lives feel.

Out of 147 countries, the UK is still fairly high at the 29th happiest, but it's dropped six places since last year's report.

So how are things looking this year, and what do the researchers think about the results?

Read on to find out more!

The word 'happy' can mean lots of different things.

You might first think of happiness as an emotion that you feel when you do something good or a nice thing happens to you.

But one of the world's most famous thinkers - or philosophers - thought of happiness a bit differently.

Writings from a Greek man called Aristotle, who lived over 2,000 years ago, have been very important in helping people think about what happiness is.

Teachers and thinkers have taken Aristotle's view of happiness to mean living a good life, with people being able to succeed to their full potential.

And it's this idea that the team behind the World Happiness Report use to rank the happiness levels of different countries.

They use a survey called the Gallup World Poll, which asks around 1,000 people in every country to imagine their life as a ladder, with the best possible version of their life at the top.

People then place where they are now on this ladder, and these scores are added up and weighed to get an average for each country.

The report says that these countries are the happiest for 2026:

Around the world, people older than 15 responded to the poll, and the picture is a bit different when the report looks at different ages.

In 85 of 136 countries, under-25s are happier now than they were twenty years ago.

But in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, happiness - as measured in the report - has fallen for this age group.

Youth happiness also fell in the UK, but by much less.

Other data that collects people's emotional happiness levels found that whilst negative emotions were on the rise, positive emotions were still twice as frequent.

This year, researchers looked at the role social media played in youth happiness, and found mixed results.

Whilst finding that internet access had a positive impact overall, they found that increased social media use in English speaking countries went hand in hand with a drop in youth happiness - but that's not necessarily a cause.

Generally, researchers link happiness with how many goods and services a country produces per person, how long people live, and levels of freedom, support, generosity and corruption.

The Scandinavian and Nordic countries of Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland and Denmark often do very well in the report, and they've all made the top six happiest countries this year.

Professor of economics at the University of Oxford and editor of the World Happiness Report, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, says that friends play a big part too.

He says that in places like Finland, "we find very high levels of social support where people have friends to rely on in case of trouble. They trust each other... And that's invaluable."