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You’ve probably heard the number before: $75,000. Somewhere along the way it became the internet’s favorite fact about money and happiness — earn that much, and more cash stops making you any happier. It got repeated so often it turned into common knowledge, the kind of thing people say at dinner parties like it’s settled science. It isn’t settled. And the real number, according to newer research digging through the same kind of data, isn’t $75,000. It’s closer to $500,000 — and even then, the story is stranger than a single number can capture.
So does money buy happiness? The honest answer is: more than we used to think, for longer than we used to think. But the reason why is where this gets genuinely interesting — because someone ran a much bigger version of this exact experiment thousands of years before anyone had a research grant.
Where the $75,000 number actually came from
Back in 2010, Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and economist Angus Deaton looked at survey data from hundreds of thousands of Americans and found something that felt reassuring: day-to-day emotional wellbeing rose with income, but only up to about $75,000 a year. Past that point, more money didn’t seem to buy more daily happiness. People clung to that number for over a decade because it let everyone off the hook — chase a solid income, then stop worrying about the rest.
Then a researcher named Matthew Killingsworth built an app called Track Your Happiness that pinged thousands of people at random moments during their actual day and asked them, in real time, how they felt. No looking back, no guessing — just “how are you feeling right now?” His data told a different story: happiness kept climbing well past $75,000, with no sign of flattening out.
Two solid studies, two different answers. So Kahneman did something unusual — instead of arguing his side, he teamed up with Killingsworth and decision scientist Barbara Mellers to dig through the raw data together and find out who was actually right. That’s called an adversarial collaboration, and it’s rare in research because it means both sides have to be willing to be wrong.
What they actually found
The combined answer turned out to be more interesting than either original study alone. For roughly 80% of people, happiness keeps rising steadily with income — no plateau at all, all the way up past $500,000 a year. The people reporting the highest happiness in the entire dataset were the ones earning $500,000 or more, though that group was small and rare in the sample.
But there was one group where the old plateau idea held up: the unhappiest 20% of people. For them, happiness does flatten out — around $100,000. Past that point, more income stops moving the needle on their misery, which suggests that whatever’s weighing on them probably isn’t a money problem to begin with. That distinction — some people’s pain responds to money, some people’s pain doesn’t — turns out to matter more than the plateau number itself. It’s the same idea behind why so many people describe feeling poor no matter their actual bank balance — the number in the account was never really the thing that needed fixing.
Other research on how people spend money adds a piece the income number can’t capture on its own: paying to buy back your own time, spending on experiences and relationships instead of things, and giving some of it away all move the happiness needle more reliably than simply earning more. Money helps — the data is honest about that — but how it’s used seems to matter almost as much as how much of it there is.
The much bigger version of this experiment
Here’s the thing every one of these studies shares: nobody in them ever actually got to run the experiment all the way to the end. Even the rare person earning $500,000 a year still has a ceiling somewhere above them, something they haven’t tried yet, some next level they can imagine.
Except one person, in a very old book, seems to have gotten about as close to that ceiling as a human being can get. A king — with the resources of an entire kingdom’s treasury behind him — decided to actually test it. He built himself houses. Planted vineyards, gardens, and orchards. Dug pools. Gathered silver, gold, singers, and every pleasure he could think to want. He didn’t hold back from his own eyes anything they desired. And when it was finished, he wrote down what he found: none of it satisfied. Not because having those things was wrong, but because he’d been asking wealth to do a job it was never built to do. Chasing more silver never actually produces enough silver — the appetite grows exactly as fast as the pile does. It’s the same conclusion a lot of people arrive at long before they hit $500,000 — the feeling that life looks fine from the outside and still feels hollow from the inside, even when nothing is technically missing.
That’s not a modern discovery. It’s about three thousand years old. Long before anyone had a survey app or a research grant, someone with functionally unlimited resources ran the experiment on purpose and came back with the same basic finding a team of PhDs would eventually confirm with a spreadsheet.
So does money buy happiness?
Maybe the real finding — in the modern research and in the old story — isn’t that money is bad, or that $500,000 is secretly the wrong number too. It’s that the number was never really the variable doing the work. What actually moved happiness in the research — a sense of control over your own time, real relationships, spending that lines up with what you actually value — is the same thing that was quietly missing for a king who could buy literally anything else. Money still helps. Nobody serious is arguing otherwise. It’s just apparently not the whole answer — and it turns out that’s not breaking news. It’s one of the oldest observations there is.
Discussion Question
If you took money completely off the table for one week — stopped chasing it, stopped worrying about it — what do you think you’d actually start chasing instead? Tell us in the comments.
Share This
- New research says happiness keeps climbing all the way past $500,000 — no plateau at $75K after all. But someone ran a much bigger version of this experiment 3,000 years ago, with literally unlimited money, and wrote down exactly what he found. Wild read.
- Turns out the “$75,000 happiness plateau” everyone quotes isn’t quite right. The real ceiling researchers are finding is closer to $500K. And a king tried the unlimited version of this a few thousand years before the study existed.
- Money helps more than we thought — up to about $500K a year, according to newer research. What it can’t do is the same thing it couldn’t do for a king with unlimited gold three millennia ago.
Questions People Are Asking
Does money actually buy happiness?
Research suggests yes, more than earlier studies implied — for most people, day-to-day happiness keeps rising with income well past the old $75,000 figure, with the highest reported happiness showing up around $500,000 a year. It plateaus mainly for the unhappiest fifth of people, whose struggles usually aren’t a money problem in the first place.
What was the original $75,000 happiness study?
In 2010, Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton analyzed survey data and found that emotional wellbeing rose with income only up to about $75,000 a year, after which more money didn’t seem to add more daily happiness. That figure became widely repeated shorthand, even though later research complicated it.
Why did the $75,000 number get revised?
A separate study by Matthew Killingsworth, using real-time mood check-ins instead of memory-based surveys, found happiness continuing to climb well past $75,000. Kahneman, Killingsworth, and researcher Barbara Mellers then combined their data and found the plateau was real only for the least happy segment of people — for most people, happiness kept rising steadily, up to and past $500,000.
What does the Bible say about money and happiness?
In the book of Ecclesiastes, a king with unmatched wealth describes deliberately pursuing every pleasure and possession available to him — houses, land, gold, entertainment — and concluding that none of it produced lasting satisfaction. The takeaway isn’t that wealth is wrong, but that it can’t do a job it was never designed to do.
What actually makes people happier than money alone?
Beyond raw income, research points to spending money to reclaim personal time, prioritizing experiences and relationships over possessions, and giving some of it away — all of which move people’s reported happiness more reliably than simply earning more.
