Does money actually buy happiness, or does it stop mattering after your bills are covered? A newer study just contradicted the famous $75,000 answer.

For over a decade, the most cited answer to this question was Daniel Kahneman's 2010 study finding that happiness rises with income only up to about $75,000 a year, after which more money barely moves the needle. Then in 2021, Matthew Killingsworth published research using real-time mood tracking that found happiness actually keeps climbing well past that number, with no plateau at all — for most people. When Kahneman and Killingsworth got together to reconcile the conflict, they found the real answer was messier: for most people happiness does keep rising with income, but for an unhappy minority, more money stops helping past a certain point unless it fixes whatever's making them miserable in the first place.

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