Life Satisfaction Score (SWLS)

This page runs the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), published by Ed Diener and colleagues in 1985 and still the most used measure of life satisfaction in research. Five statements, each rated 1 to 7, summed for a total between 5 and 35.

What it measures, and what it deliberately does not

The SWLS asks a cognitive question: when you step back and judge your life against your own standards, how does it look? It does not ask how you feel today.

That distinction is the design. Subjective wellbeing has two halves, and they move independently. The affective half is your day-to-day balance of pleasant and unpleasant feeling. The cognitive half is your considered judgement about the whole. A person can have a cheerful week inside a life they consider a disappointment, and the reverse is at least as common. Diener built the SWLS to capture only the second, and to let you supply the standards rather than imposing someone else’s list of what a good life contains. There is no item here about money, health, marriage or work, and that is on purpose.

The five items

1. In most ways my life is close to my ideal
2. The conditions of my life are excellent
3. I am satisfied with my life
4. So far I have gotten the important things I want in life
5. If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing

Scoring

Each answer runs 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Add all five. Note the midpoint: 4 is “neither agree nor disagree”, so answering 4 to everything gives exactly 20, the neutral score.

Worked example

Someone answers 5, 5, 6, 4, 3.

Total = 5 + 5 + 6 + 4 + 3 = 23 of 35, the slightly-satisfied band, averaging 4.6 per item.

The profile is more informative than the total. Item 3, general satisfaction, sits at 6, while item 5, “would change almost nothing”, sits at 3. That gap is the ordinary shape of a satisfied person with one specific regret, and it is invisible in the number 23.

What the numbers look like in the population

Most economically developed samples average somewhere in the low-to-mid 20s, which is why 23 reads as unremarkable rather than good. Diener’s own guidance is that scores in the 21 to 25 band describe people who are broadly content with some genuine dissatisfaction in specific areas, and that is the largest group.

Item 5 is the reliable outlier. It scores lower than the rest for almost everyone, because “I would change almost nothing” is a much stronger claim than “I am satisfied”, and a low score there on its own means very little.

Using it properly

The SWLS earns its keep on repetition, not on a single reading. It has good test-retest reliability over weeks and genuinely moves with life circumstances over months, so taking it every few months and keeping the numbers tells you something a one-off cannot. A change of about 3 points or more is generally taken as meaningful rather than noise.

It is also worth knowing what it is sensitive to. Mood on the day nudges it, the weather nudges it slightly, and the question immediately before it nudges it more than you would like: asking about someone’s dating life first measurably shifts their answer. Take it in a settled moment, not straight after an argument or a promotion.

Not a clinical instrument

This is a self-report scale for personal insight and research, not a diagnosis. Low life satisfaction is not depression, and the two come apart often. If a low score has persisted for months, or arrives with sleep, appetite or energy changes, that is a conversation with a professional rather than a number to retake.