This is how much money you need to earn to be happy, according to new study

Is money the key to happiness?

(Getty Images/iStockphoto)

They say money can’t buy happiness. However, if reports are to be believed, this may not be entirely true.

A recent study claims that earning a certain amount of money could be the key to greater fulfilment and satisfaction in life.

A team from the Purdue University in Indiana carried out research using the Gallup World Poll, a representative survey sample that collates data from more than 1.7m people from 164 countries worldwide.

The researchers noted the emotional wellbeing and life evaluation (life satisfaction) of the participants by analysing their purchasing power and answers that they’d provided to questions in regard to their life satisfaction and wellbeing.

These findings were then compared to the individuals’ yearly incomes in order to gauge their overall happiness.

As can be expected, people reached ‘income satiation’ at a variety of different stages depending on where in the world they’re from.

In general, individuals from wealthier countries felt more satisfied with their lives when earning higher salaries.

“Consistent with past research indicating that income matters more for wellbeing in wealthier nations, this pattern of results suggested that satiation level was related to the overall wealth of the region,” the authors wrote in the study.

The region with the highest income satiation was Australia and New Zealand, with the total that people needed to earn annually before reaching a greater level of happiness reaching an average of $125,000 (£89,403).

In comparison, the region with the lowest income satiation was Latin America and the Caribbean, with a figure of $35,000 (£25,033).

Location wasn’t the only factor that the researchers considered when assessing how much money people need to earn on a yearly basis before they can describe themselves as truly happy.

They also decided to examine whether gender played a role in income satiation.

“We hypothesised that satiation might occur later for men than women due to the fact that the income-happiness link is empirically stronger in men and because of the strong emphasis on achievement and social status within conventional masculine gender norms.”

However, the team stood corrected, as their results showed that men and women reached satiety for life evaluation at similar levels, with the figure reaching $100,000 (£71,523) for women and $90,000 (£64,370) for men.

The team, led by doctoral student in the Department of Psychological Sciences Andrew T. Jebb, discussed the reasons why people earning higher salaries may take longer to achieve happiness than those on lower incomes.

“High incomes are usually accompanied with high demands (time, workload, responsibility and so on) that might also limit opportunities for positive experiences, for example, leisure and activities,” they wrote.

“Additional factors may play a role as well, such as an increase in materialistic values, additional material aspirations that may go unfulfilled, increased social comparisons or other life changes in reaction to greater income (for example, more children or living in more expensive neighbourhoods).”

In April 2017, the average man working full-time in the UK was earning £592 per week with women earning an average of £494 as stated by the Office for National Statistics.

This equates to average monthly earnings of £2,368 for men and £1,976 for women.

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