Costa Rica reached a record fourth place in the World Happiness Report 2026, its highest position ever in the annual global ranking and the best result yet for any Latin American country. The report placed Costa Rica behind only Finland, Iceland and Denmark, with Sweden in fifth.
The new ranking marks a sharp rise for Costa Rica. Oxford’s summary of the report said the country climbed from a low of 23rd in 2023 to fourth this year, putting it inside the global top five for the first time.
The World Happiness Report is produced by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford in partnership with Gallup, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and an independent editorial board. Its rankings are based on how people evaluate their own lives, using three-year averages from 2023 through 2025. Costa Rica posted an average life evaluation score of 7.439.
That matters because the ranking is not a simple measure of wealth or economic output. The report centers on how people rate the quality of their lives, then looks at broader conditions tied to wellbeing, including income, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity and perceptions of corruption.
Costa Rica’s finish stands out in a list usually dominated by northern European countries. Gallup said the 2026 results show the top of the table now stretches beyond Western advanced economies, with Costa Rica entering the top five for the first time. Mexico also ranked strongly at 12th, giving Latin America two countries near the top of the list.
The report also arrived with a broader warning about youth wellbeing and social media use. Its 2026 edition highlighted evidence that heavy social media use is linked to falling wellbeing among young people in several countries, especially girls in parts of the English-speaking world and Western Europe. At the same time, the report noted that regional patterns are not uniform, and Costa Rica’s strong finish came in a year when global attention was focused on the role of social connection in overall happiness.
For Costa Rica, the ranking is likely to add to a long-running image of our country as a place where quality of life is shaped by more than income alone. The result suggests that despite ongoing concerns over security, infrastructure, cost of living and inequality, many people in Costa Rica continue to rate their lives highly by international standards. That does not erase the country’s problems, but it does put it near the top of one of the world’s most closely watched measures of wellbeing.
The result was quickly framed as a national milestone. Costa Rica’s foreign ministry said the country had reached its highest position ever in the report and entered the top five for the first time.
