Where the words come from
The standard of living as all elements that affect people's well-being, what GDP leaves out (leisure, actual health and environmental cleanliness, inequality, defensive spending such as rebuilding after a disaster and burglar alarms), and GDP as a rough but useful measure that tracks production, jobs and incomes and moves with education, health and environmental protection — Principles of Economics 2e, OpenStax, licensed CC BY 4.0. https://openstax.org/books/principles-economics-2e/pages/19-5-how-well-gdp-measures-the-well-being-of-society. Changes: Condensed; the US and German hours comparison and US figures dropped; the hurricane put as a flood; "bars and burglar alarms" cut to burglar alarms; "rough-and-ready measure" kept, "reasonable" dropped; British spelling.
Personal well-being as people's views of their own well-being, the four ONS questions and their 0 to 10 scale, asked since April 2011, reported separately because it is not appropriate to combine them, the benefit that people decide what is important, and more positive answers by telephone than face to face — Personal well-being user guidance, Office for National Statistics (14 January 2025), Open Government Licence v3.0. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/methodologies/personalwellbeingsurveyuserguide. Changes: The four questions condensed into card definitions; "take account of what matters to people by allowing them to decide what is important" condensed; the card wording and the anxiety note are ours.
About sixty measures in ten topic areas, GDP per head 0.9 per cent higher in Quarter 1 2026 than a year earlier and 11.6 per cent higher than in Quarter 1 2021, healthy life expectancy falling between 2019 to 2021 and 2022 to 2024, depression or anxiety rising from 19.7 per cent in 2018 to 2019 to 24.6 per cent in 2023 to 2024, personal well-being measures improving against the October to December 2020 pandemic base, the ONS caution that such comparisons partly reflect recovery from an unusual base period, and the October to December 2025 shares with low life satisfaction (4.9 per cent), low worthwhile (3.9 per cent), low happiness (8.1 per cent) and high anxiety (23.6 per cent) — Beyond GDP insights, UK measures of National Well-being: June 2026, Office for National Statistics (8 June 2026), Open Government Licence v3.0. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/bulletins/measuringprogresswellbeingandbeyondgdpintheuk/june2026. Changes: The dashboard's 59 measures and the bulletin's 60 given as about sixty; the GDP, health and personal well-being findings condensed, with the health figures quoted as published; the note that much of the five-year GDP rise is recovery from a lockdown quarter follows the bulletin's own caution about pandemic base periods; the card example figures quoted as published; setting GDP beside the health and personal well-being measures is ours, and the ONS cautions that its measures differ in period and coverage.
Self-reported health, marital status and economic activity having the strongest associations with life satisfaction, and household income and spending mattering less than personal circumstances — Personal and economic well-being: what matters most to our life satisfaction?, Office for National Statistics (15 May 2019), Open Government Licence v3.0. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/articles/personalandeconomicwellbeingintheuk/whatmattersmosttoourlifesatisfaction. Changes: Used in the second paragraph of the explain that carries the ons-beyondgdp id; "economic activity" kept, with being unemployed or retired as examples from the article; spending's stronger link than income dropped; the closing sentence of that paragraph is from ons-guide.
The low and high rating thresholds, more positive answers by telephone than face to face, and regression models explaining between 11 and 22 per cent of the differences in personal well-being between people — Personal well-being in the UK: April 2022 to March 2023, Office for National Statistics (7 November 2023), Open Government Licence v3.0. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/bulletins/measuringnationalwellbeing/april2022tomarch2023. Changes: Condensed; the explain's last clause on comparing measures of different timing and coverage is from the ons-beyondgdp bulletin's data-quality section.
Questions, options, diagrams and feedback are our own. Figures credited to a source above are that source's; every other figure is invented to show the method.