By Brad Young, Money feature writer
Finland is the happiest nation in the world, according to a new report that shows the UK lagging behind in 23rd place.
People living in Finland rated their life satisfaction 7.7/10 on average, compared to 6.7 in the UK, in a survey of more than 150,000 people in 147 countries.
Nordic nations dominated the top of the table in Oxford University’s World Happiness Report, with Denmark, Iceland and Sweden in 2nd, 3rd and 4th, while the UK fell three places from 20th last year.
Britain was leapfrogged by Slovenia, Mexico, the UAE and Germany, and now sits just behind the latter and just ahead of the United States.
It’s the eighth year in a row Finland has come out on top in a report that analyses people’s wealth, social ties, health, trust, freedom and generosity.
Critical to explaining why Finland is happier than the UK are differences in work culture, wealth distribution and the cost of living, according to experts, expats and citizens.
Here we take a look at how this has affected people who have lived in both nations.
Work culture
“It’s undeniably so much better in so many ways,” says Kjartan Kelly, 31, a personal trainer who moved from Cardiff to Tampere, a city of around 200,000 in southern Finland, in 2020.
“The work culture is definitely healthier than what it was like in the UK, that’s for sure,” he says, adding that better wages and workers’ rights allow people more free time.
He points to more generous holiday and parental leave entitlements.
Each parent is entitled to almost 23 weeks leave, paid using a complicated formula based on income. It means that a worker earning £25,000 a year is entitled to £53 each workday.
In the UK, fathers are legally entitled to two weeks’ paid leave at £184 a week or 90% of their salary, whichever is lower. Mothers are entitled to 52 weeks of maternity leave: 39 weeks paid at the same rate as men.
Kjartan, a former British Army soldier, says Finnish employers feel a greater sense of obligation towards their staff, which he put down, in part, to the country’s mandatory military service.
“Let’s say you start a company and you’re employing people, you’re going to be less likely to want to exploit your workers if you’ve been crawling through the snow and mud with them, all in it together.
“There’s not as much of a class attitude as in the UK.”
Sara Karpanen, 37, says adjusting to British work culture was the biggest learning curve she faced when moving from the town of Hyvinkaa, southern Finland, to London in 2013.
“I’m always amazed how the Finnish people have mastered this work-life balance,” says Sara, arts programme director at the Finnish Institute.
“It’s not necessarily that Finnish people work less, I think it’s actually more that we work more efficiently.”
Offices are mostly empty by 4pm “so there is enough time for you to have a life outside of work”, she says.
Paid overtime is more common, so it is rarer for companies to ask employees to stay at the office, she adds.
She feels there is an expectation in the UK that employees “prioritise work over anything else” and a culture that “emphasises hustle”.
But for any Britons sold on the Finnish approach, it’s not always plain sailing.
Daniel Beech moved from Colchester to Helsinki in 2004 to live with his wife. “Trying to find work here when you don’t speak Finnish and don’t work in IT is a massive struggle,” he says.
Layoffs and recent cuts to unemployment benefits have made the situation “much worse over the last year”, he says.
Unemployment in Finland is growing, says Finnish economist Jan Otto Andersson, who has written academic papers on happiness in the country.
It rose to 9.5% in January, according to Statistics Finland, compared to 4.4% in the UK.
Recent spending cuts by the Finnish government have also contributed to rising poverty, says Jan, a former professor at City of London Polytechnic and Finland’s Abo Akademi University.
Finnish media reports its right-wing government is instituting cuts to welfare benefits and social healthcare services.
“So there are a lot of things that could make someone less happy,” Jan says.
Wealth, taxes and welfare
The International Monetary Fund puts British GDP – the value of all its goods and services – at $3.73tn compared to Finland’s $319.99bn.
This works out at similar levels per head – £38,130 in the UK and £40,800 in Finland – because the British population is 12.4 times greater.
But Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, editor of the World Happiness Report, says these figures “hide huge inequalities” that affect wellbeing scores.
Most Finns’ wealth hovers around the average GDP, whereas in the UK, the average is deceptively high due to a few people with lots of wealth.
“Scandinavia has been very good at looking after people at the very bottom end of the wellbeing scale and that’s a combination of income and mental illness. The welfare state, the redistribution, enables that,” he says.
Redistribution is funded by some higher taxes. VAT is levied at 25.5% (versus 20% in the UK), social security payments amount to approximately 9.3% (compared to the UK’s 8% National Insurance tax) and income tax is split into six bands up to 55%, compared to four bands up to 45% in the UK.
“When I first moved to Finland, I always felt a little bit funny about having to pay higher taxes,” say Darren Trofimczuk, 47, from Tunbridge Wells, who lived in Jarvenpaa, near Helsinki, between 2012 and 2023.
“But over time I realised that you can actually trust the Finnish system,” the father-of-two says.
“You felt comfortable with [higher taxes] because the money would be reinvested so you felt much safer within the system,” said Darren adding the government funded his master’s degree.
Education is free at all levels in Finland. At university, this includes EU citizens who want to study there.
Jan-Emmanuel says that once a country becomes as rich as Finland or the UK, GDP growth no longer translates into more happiness.
It must be redistributed in a way that serves people’s wellbeing, he says, whereas Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves appear too focused on “growth for the sake of growth”.
Helsinki deputy mayor Daniel Sazonov says Finns have “seen and felt the benefits” of the Nordic welfare model (which ensures a high degree of access to basic services and a wide safety net) and this is reflected in the results of the World Happiness Report.
“They see opportunities, possibilities for themselves and their children and they all the time have the trust that if life does not go as planned you have welfare system and the social security system.”
Given the praise for its welfare system, you may be surprised to learn that one of its key components, healthcare, is not strictly free.
The vast majority is tax-funded, but patients need to pay small fees, such as €20 for a GP appointment, €10 for dentists or up to €50 for prescriptions or inpatient hospital care.
By comparison, a dentist’s appointment in the UK costs £26.80, while prescriptions cost £9.90 per item and, of course, GP and hospital visits are free.
Finland performs slightly better in terms of healthy life expectancy (HLE), which will affect happiness scores, says Jan-Emmanuel.
The latest data available from the World Health Organisation puts Finland’s average HLE from birth at 69.9 years in 2021, while in the UK it was 68.6 years.
Cost of living
When Darren Trofimczuk moved back to the UK, he was “shocked” by what he found.
So much more expensive was the cost of living that he told his wife, Elina, and their two children not to follow him, as had originally been planned.
“I’ve been shocked. Living in Finland for 11 years, it was always a much more expensive country. But it’s, I think, the other way around now.”
While Finnish inflation has generally trended a little below the UK over the past five years, it has pulled further down in recent months, with the UK recording a rate of 2.8% in February compared to 0.5% in Finland.
Darren says it took him a year to find a one-bed flat near London, competing against queues of other applicants to pay more than £1,000 a month.
It’s the same price as the mortgage for his three-bed family home just outside the Finnish capital, complete with a large garden.
Personal trainer Kjartan, who is in the process of buying a house, agrees: “Working at Finnish wages, it’s really not that difficult to do. You just need to work for a few years.”
Like-for-like house price data isn’t available for the UK and Finland.
The Finnish government’s statistics agency says the average price (excluding new builds) in the last quarter of 2024 was £2,174 per square metre, rising to £4,130 for new builds.
The UK House Price Index puts the cost of an average house at £268,548, but British statistics agencies have not published data by square metre since 2016.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government did measure the average floor space of an English home in 2019, finding it to be 94 metres squared. By that measure and today’s average house price, the cost of a British home would be around £2,857 per square metre.
Beyond housing, Darren found energy and food were roughly the same price in both countries, but transport has proved more expensive in the UK.
Each year he takes a 500-mile train ride from Helsinki to Rovaniemi for a Lapland fishing trip that costs £18.50. At rush hour, the 34-mile journey from Tunbridge Wells to London Bridge sets him back £31.
Frequent changes to the cost of living, as many in Britain will experience come 1 April when most household bills go up, have left Darren finding it more difficult to save than in Finland.
“You always live a little bit on edge, like you never know is your job secure or is there going to be another increase in something?”
He feels any money put away is just on “standby” mode to absorb the next financial shock, rather than plan for the future.
