I’d rather be happier at work than get a pay rise – would you?

The Independent

But once you do reach a tipping point, the bottom line might not be as important as you think. The relationship between income and happiness is “logarithmic”, according to research – it means that if you doubled your salary from £20k to £40k, to experience the same uptick in happiness again, you’d have to double it to £80k. As well as diminishing returns, there’s also a ceiling: past £120k (this, in itself, only ever achieved by the top 1 per cent of Brits), we “no longer detect a statistically significant relationship between further money and life satisfaction”, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, professor of economics and behavioural science at the University of Oxford, told BBC Radio 4’s Money Box.