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

Nature Human Behaviour (2025)Cite this article

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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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Fig. 1: Summary of significant associations between individual and community-level SES indicators of subjective income and education with self-reported emotions, stress, health behaviour, health status and physiological outcomes.
Fig. 2: Nonlinear relationships between subjective income, education and outcome measures.
Fig. 3: A visual depiction of the counties represented in this sample.

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Data availability

Data are available in OSF at https://osf.io/25wk3/ (ref. 43).

Code availability

Analytic code files are available in OSF at https://osf.io/25wk3/ (ref. 43).

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by NIA (R24AG048), NIMH (T32MH019391) and Samsung Research, awarded to W.B.M. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, CA, USA

    David B. Newman

  2. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Amie M. Gordon

  3. Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Wendy Berry Mendes

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  1. David B. Newman
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  2. Amie M. Gordon
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  3. Wendy Berry Mendes
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Contributions

D.B.N. conceptualized the project, conducted formal analysis and wrote the original draft. A.M.G. conceptualized the project, and reviewed and edited the paper. W.B.M. conceptualized and supervised the project, acquired funding, conducted investigation, and reviewed and edited the paper.

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Correspondence to David B. Newman.

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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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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Lianne de Vries, Inaki Permanyer and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

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Newman, D.B., Gordon, A.M. & Mendes, W.B. Income and education show distinct links to health and happiness in daily life. Nat Hum Behav (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02264-9

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