A common metric for measuring
how decisions shape human wellbeing.
WALY
Calculator & Library
Not seeing a WALY value that fits your scenario? The list of values featured below is not exhaustive. WALYs can be applied across a broader range of cases, spanning additional impact areas, geographies, partial treatment effects, and multi-sectoral outcomes.
The Happiness Research Institute offers custom impact analyses, built around your organisation's real activities.
A few insights worth pausing on:
01
Scale vs. severity:
While uncommon, cystic fibrosis is the most individually severe.
Cystic fibrosis carries the highest individual WALY of any health condition in this table. Yet, it isn't nearly as prevalent as diabetes or colorectal cancer. This is a striking illustration of how individual burden and population burden can point in opposite directions: the conditions that dominate public health investment are often those affecting the largest populations, not necessarily those inflicting the deepest suffering on each person. WALY makes both scale & severity dimensions visible at once.
02
Duration matters:
1 year of loneliness remains one of the gravest burdens
Loneliness is a problem affecting a growing share of the population, yet one that has been treated with comparatively little urgency. Notably, the loneliness calculation shown here only captures the wellbeing loss associated with one year of avoided loneliness; in reality, many people experience loneliness for far longer. Even with this conservative viewpoint, loneliness rivals the largest disease burdens.
03
Money can buy happiness... but it often matters less than mental health
As a society we devote vast attention and resources to raising incomes, and comparatively little to mental health. The ranking tells a different story. Even if we restrict to treating depression for just one year, this would generate nearly 2x the wellbeing impact of giving every low-income person a $1,000-per-month raise in the U.S.A. Mental health appears to carry far more weight on collective wellbeing than the economic levers we obsess over.