£50,000 a year is still the happiest wage

by Ed Bowsher on 07 September 2010  |  14 comments
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If your boss offers you a salary higher than £50,000, maybe you should say no....

Back in July lovemoney.com published a survey which looked at salaries and happiness. We discovered that people earning around £50,000 a year are the happiest in the country.*

We asked people how happy they were and then compared their responses with their salaries. The interesting thing was that people earning £50,000 a year were happier than those on £70,000 and above.

Now I’d understand if some people dismissed the findings of our survey. If I was offered the choice of a salary of £50,000 or £75,000, I’d take the higher figure and I’m pretty sure I’d be happier as a result. I suspect many people would agree with me.

However, another survey has been published on this topic and guess what? Once again, the happiest wage is £50,000. This survey found that happiness rose in line with salary but only until people earned $75,000 a year, the equivalent of around £50,000.

What’s more, this survey was conducted by a psychologist at Princeton who won the Nobel Prize of Economics in 2002. So it has real academic heft.

What do you think? Have you earned a high salary in the past and been happier since you’ve been earning less. Or maybe you’re earning £200,000 a year and couldn’t be happier? Let us know....

*The survey was conducted for lovemoney.com by a polling company called OnePoll. 3000 people answered the survey – they were all on OnePoll’s database of survey respondents.