Wellbeing is measured through more than one lens: how people rate their lives, how long and how healthily they live, their mental health, relationships, housing and daily habits. Recent official statistics show meaningful differences by country, age, sex, health status and measurement method.
Contents
- Current UK wellbeing snapshot
- How wellbeing differs across people
- Global health and longevity
- Wellbeing across OECD societies
- Mental health and emotional wellbeing
- Sleep and physical activity
Current UK wellbeing snapshot
The latest UK headline measures reported by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) put the UK mean life-satisfaction score at 7.5 out of 10 in January to March 2026. In the same quarter, 5.0% of adults reported low life satisfaction. These are population measures of personal wellbeing, not clinical assessments. (ONS, Beyond GDP insights, UK headline measures of National Well-being: September 2026)
For context, Great Britain’s mean life-satisfaction score was 7.7 out of 10 in January to March 2019, the pre-pandemic comparison used by the ONS. The two figures come from different periods and should be read as a comparison point rather than as a measure of an individual change in wellbeing.
Social connection is another part of the UK picture. Around 65.3% of adults in Great Britain said they trusted most people in June 2026. The share who felt they belonged to their neighbourhood rose from 53.3% in June 2025 to 63.6% in April 2026. These indicators describe trust and belonging at specified survey points; they do not measure every aspect of social support.
Economic context can also be tracked alongside wellbeing without treating it as a substitute for wellbeing. UK GDP per head was 2.2% above its pre-COVID level in April to June 2026. The ONS presents this as a broader “beyond GDP” context, while life satisfaction and belonging capture experiences that GDP per head does not.
How wellbeing differs across people
The ONS’s detailed personal-wellbeing release for the year ending March 2023 reported an average UK life-satisfaction rating of 7.45 out of 10. Average happiness yesterday was 7.39 out of 10, while average anxiety yesterday was 3.23 out of 10. In that same period, 23.4% of UK adults reported high anxiety. (ONS, Personal well-being in the UK: April 2022 to March 2023)
The distribution was not uniform. Women reported high anxiety at 26.6%, compared with 20.0% for men. Among age groups highlighted by the ONS, adults aged 50 to 54 had a 7.9% rate of low life satisfaction, while adults aged 55 to 59 had a 10.9% rate of low happiness.
Self-rated health showed one of the clearest differences. Among UK adults who described their health as very bad, 43.5% reported low life satisfaction. Low happiness was reported by 46.5% of this group, compared with 3.8% among adults who reported very good health. These figures are associations within the ONS measures; they do not establish that one factor caused the other.
Family circumstances also varied. UK parents living with a dependent child under 19 reported low life satisfaction at 4.4%, compared with 6.2% among adults without dependent children in the year ending March 2023. The comparison describes the groups as defined in the source and should not be generalized to every family situation.
Global health and longevity
WHO estimates show how the COVID-19 period affected population health worldwide. Global life expectancy at birth fell by 1.8 years to 71.4 years between 2019 and 2021. Global healthy life expectancy at birth fell by 1.5 years to 61.9 years in 2021. Healthy life expectancy reflects years expected to be lived in good health, so it is a different measure from total life expectancy. (WHO, COVID-19 eliminated a decade of progress in global level of life expectancy)
The change was larger in some WHO regions. Life expectancy in both the Region of the Americas and the South-East Asia Region fell by approximately 3 years between 2019 and 2021. Healthy life expectancy in each of those regions fell by approximately 2.5 years over the same period. These are regional estimates, not country-level results.
Nutrition statistics show that wellbeing challenges can exist at the same time and in different forms. In 2022, more than 1 billion people aged 5 years and older were living with obesity, while more than 500 million people were underweight. WHO also estimated that 148 million children under 5 had stunting, 45 million had wasting and 37 million were overweight in 2022.
The figures below use different populations and units, so they are not a ranking of problems by severity.
| Global indicator | Estimate | Period |
|---|---|---|
| Life expectancy at birth | 71.4 years | 2021 |
| Healthy life expectancy at birth | 61.9 years | 2021 |
| People aged 5+ living with obesity | More than 1 billion | 2022 |
| Children under 5 with stunting | 148 million | 2022 |
| Children under 5 with wasting | 45 million | 2022 |
| Children under 5 overweight | 37 million | 2022 |
Wellbeing across OECD societies
Across OECD countries, average life satisfaction was 7.4 out of 10 in 2023. The OECD average share of people scoring 4 or below for life satisfaction fell from 8% in 2013 to about 5% in 2022. The two indicators use different years, and an OECD average does not describe every member country. (OECD, How has well-being fared during recent crises?: How’s Life? 2024)
Work and health indicators add detail. About 7% of employees across OECD countries regularly worked 50 hours or more per week in 2022. Potential years of life lost averaged about 5,100 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2021. Deaths from suicide, acute alcohol abuse and drug overdose averaged 23.6 per 100,000 people, while average homicides were 3.5 per 100,000 people in 2021. (OECD, The state of well-being in OECD countries today: How’s Life? 2024)
Perceptions of safety differed by sex. In 2022 to 2023, 82% of men and 67% of women across OECD countries said they felt safe walking alone at night in their neighbourhood. Loneliness prevalence ranged from below 4% to nearly 14% among OECD countries with available data in 2023, and the share reporting loneliness rose by an average 0.06 percentage points per year relative to 2018.
Material conditions remain part of the wellbeing picture. Almost 12% of households across OECD countries lived in overcrowded conditions in the latest available year used in How’s Life? 2024. Households had an average 79% of disposable income left after housing rents and maintenance costs. Men earned about 12% more than women on average in the latest available year used by the report, and the richest 20% of households received 5.6 times as much income as the poorest 20% in 2022.
Mental health and emotional wellbeing
U.S. CDC estimates provide recent measures of symptoms and treatment, but the definitions and periods matter. In 2022, 18.2% of U.S. adults had any anxiety symptoms in the past two weeks and 21.4% had any depression symptoms in the past two weeks. (CDC, Symptoms of Anxiety and Depression Among Adults: United States, 2019 and 2022)
Both measures were higher than in 2019: anxiety symptoms rose from 15.6% to 18.2%, and depression symptoms rose from 18.5% to 21.4%. The same CDC report recorded that, in 2019, 8.1% of U.S. adults had anxiety-disorder symptoms, 6.5% had depressive-disorder symptoms and 10.8% had either symptom type. These labels and time windows should not be treated as interchangeable.
Treatment use also changed. The share of all U.S. adults receiving any mental-health treatment in the past 12 months rose from 19.2% in 2019 to 21.6% in 2021. Among adults aged 18 to 44, treatment rose from 18.5% to 23.2%. In 2021, treatment was reported by 21.2% of adults aged 45 to 64 and 18.9% of those aged 65 and older. (CDC, Mental Health Treatment Among Adults Aged 18–44: United States, 2019–2021)
Within the 18-to-44 age group, treatment rose from 13.1% to 17.8% for men and from 23.8% to 28.6% for women between 2019 and 2021. It rose from 23.8% to 30.4% for non-Hispanic White adults and from 6.0% to 10.8% for non-Hispanic Asian adults. These comparisons describe reported treatment, not unmet need or treatment quality.
Sleep and physical activity
Sleep-related measures show both medication use and insufficient sleep. In the United States, 8.4% of adults took sleep medication every day or most days in the past 30 days in 2020; 6.3% took it every day. Meanwhile, 81.6% never took sleep medication in that period. Women were more likely than men to take sleep medication: 10.2% compared with 6.6%. (CDC, Sleep Medication Use in Adults Aged 18 and Over: United States, 2020)
The age-adjusted share of U.S. adults not getting enough sleep was 36.8% in 2022, compared with 33.3% in 2020. In 2022, the corresponding share was 36.0% for adult women and 37.5% for adult men, based on age-adjusted Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System estimates. (CDC, FastStats: Sleep in Adults)
Physical activity is measured against a defined threshold. Among U.S. adults aged 65 and older, 13.9% met both aerobic and muscle-strengthening guidelines in 2022 after age adjustment; the crude share was 14.4%. (CDC, Physical Activity Among Adults Aged 65 and Over: United States, 2022)
For that CDC estimate, the guideline meant 150 to 300 minutes of moderate aerobic activity per week, or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous activity, plus muscle-strengthening activity on at least two days per week. This sentence states the threshold applied to the estimate, not an additional prevalence result.
These statistics combine official measures from the ONS, WHO, OECD and U.S. CDC. Their populations, thresholds, survey questions, units and measurement dates differ, so UK personal-wellbeing ratings, OECD cross-country indicators, WHO global estimates and U.S. survey estimates should not be directly compared as though they were one dataset. Health and mental-health figures describe measured or self-reported population outcomes and are not personal medical advice.