In 2023, two researchers whose earlier work had reached opposite conclusions about money and happiness — Daniel Kahneman, who had said well-being plateaued around $75,000, and Matthew Killingsworth, who had said it kept rising — carried out an "adversarial collaboration" and reconciled their findings in PNAS: for most people happiness does keep rising with income beyond $100,000, while an unhappy minority plateaus

For a few years I carried a tidy little fact around. Money stops mattering for happiness once you clear about $75,000. Past that, you are just chasing numbers on a screen.

I used to say it at dinners. I half believed it because it let me off a hook I could not quite name, the sense that I was not earning enough and should be. If money didn’t buy happiness past a certain point, then I was fine where I was. What a relief that was.

The trouble is the fact was never as clean as I believed. In 2023, the two researchers whose work sat on opposite sides of it sat down together and worked out what was actually going on. The answer is more interesting than the simple version I had been quoting. 

A quick note before I go further. I am a curious reader here, not a psychologist or an economist. What follows is my reading of a piece of research, not advice about your salary or your life. The studies below are patterns drawn from particular groups of people, not settled laws about you or anyone else.

The neat version, and where it came from

The fact I shared came from a real and serious study. In 2010, Princeton’s Daniel Kahneman and the economist Angus Deaton analysed more than 450,000 survey responses from US residents. They found that day-to-day mood rose with income only up to around $75,000 a year, then leveled off. More money kept improving how people rated their lives overall. But the moment-to-moment feeling of a good day stopped climbing.

That is where the pop version came from. It got flattened, as these things do, into “money can’t buy happiness past $75k,” which is not quite what the study said but close enough to feel true, and comforting enough to spread.

Then someone found the opposite

In 2021, Wharton’s Matthew Killingsworth ran the question again with a different method. Instead of asking people to recall a whole day, he pinged them in real time through a smartphone app and asked how they felt right then. His finding was that happiness rises with income even above $75,000, with no plateau in sight. It just kept going up with the money.

Two careful studies, two respected researchers, one saying happiness flattens out and the other saying it keeps climbing. Not a small disagreement around the edges. A flat contradiction at the center.

What they did instead of arguing

The part I like most is this. Rather than trade rebuttals in journals for a decade, they proposed what is called an adversarial collaboration. The two people who disagree pool their raw data, reanalyse it together, and bring in a neutral third party to settle it.

Their joint paper, Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved, came out in March 2023.

What they found is that both of them had been right, just about different people. Killingsworth put it plainly: “The two findings that seemed utterly contradictory actually result from data that are amazingly consistent,” he said.

The real answer, split two ways

The key was to split people by how happy they already were. For most people, happiness keeps rising with income, well past $100,000, and for the happiest group it even speeds up. As Killingsworth summed it up, “In the simplest terms, this suggests that for most people larger incomes are associated with greater happiness.”

But there is an unhappy minority for whom the picture is different. Their happiness rises with income only up to about $100,000, then flattens. That figure is the original $75,000 adjusted for inflation. Same line, moved for the passage of time. Mellers put it carefully: “The function differs for people with different levels of emotional well-being,” she said.

Killingsworth was blunt about who money doesn’t rescue. “The exception is people who are financially well-off but unhappy. For instance, if you’re rich and miserable, more money won’t help,” he said.

That is a pattern in one dataset, not a proven law, but it rings true to me.

What I take from it

The frame I keep coming back to is this. Money seems to buy the removal of misery more reliably than it buys joy. When something is genuinely going wrong, more of it clears the thing that is going wrong, and that shows up as feeling better. When life is basically fine, more of it does less than you expect, and sometimes nothing you can feel.

None of this means money doesn’t matter. It plainly does, more than my tidy little fact ever admitted. Killingsworth’s own summary is the version I would repeat now instead: “Money is not the secret to happiness, but it can probably help a bit,” he said.

None of this is advice about your money or your happiness. It is one reader’s take on one piece of research, and the research describes patterns across large groups, not you.