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. 2025 Aug 8.
doi: 10.1038/s41562-025-02264-9. Online ahead of print.

Income and education show distinct links to health and happiness in daily life

David B Newman  1 , Amie M Gordon  2 , Wendy Berry Mendes  3
Affiliations

Income and education show distinct links to health and happiness in daily life

David B Newman et al. Nat Hum Behav. .

Abstract

With growing levels of inequality, understanding relationships between socioeconomic status (SES), health and well-being is as important as ever. Many studies focus on associations between an SES composite and either health 'or' happiness; here we examine unique relationships between SES indicators (income and education) and health 'and' well-being outcomes at both individual and community levels, drawing on a sample of adults (N = 71,385; Mage = 40.62, s.d. = 13.20) from more than 10 countries and representing 13,089 unique ZIP codes within the United States. A subset (N = 29,567) participated in an Ecological Momentary Assessment study by providing daily reports of their emotions, blood pressure and heart rate (Nobs = 329,543) for 3 weeks. Generally, higher levels of education were more consistently linked to indicators of better health, whereas higher levels of income were associated with higher levels of well-being. Individual-level SES predicted health and well-being more strongly than community-level factors.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests: W.B.M. received grant support, in part, from Samsung Digital and Samsung Research (see ‘Acknowledgements’ section). Samsung had no scientific role in the design of the study nor provided any input on this article.

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