• Posted April 10, 2025

Pets May Boost Happiness As Much As Family or Friends

Your cat might not do the dishes, and your dog probably can’t fix your Wi-Fi, but they could be making you just as happy as a spouse or best friend.

A new study found that having a furry friend may boost your overall life satisfaction as much as being married or regularly spending time with loved ones.

And it's something researchers can actually put a price tag on. A team in the U.K. says the emotional value of owning a pet is worth as much £70,000, or about $90,000 a year in life satisfaction. 

That's a statistical measure they use to gauge the "implicit price" of otherwise intangible things — for example, the theoretical boost in income a person would get from having a spouse or regular meet-ups with friends.

The findings were published March 31 in the journal Social Indicators Research.

“First when I obtained the values I was surprised; I was thinking that is a lot of money even for me who loves (pets),” study co-author Adelina Gschwandtner, an economics professor at the University of Kent, told CNN.

“Most people claim that their pets are like friends or family members to them, so that is comparable,” she added.

“If pets are indeed like friends and family, why shouldn’t that measure be comparable to talking to friends and family once a week? You have your pet every day.”

Researchers compared their findings with other studies that used the same methods to calculate the value of being married or regularly meeting with loved ones. 

The results? Pet ownership had a similar positive impact on overall well-being, CNN reported.

The team used data from a survey of 2,500 British households and a special tool called an "instrumental variables approach."

This works by finding “a third variable which is correlated with … the pets but is not correlated with life satisfaction,” Gschwandtner said.

The findings suggest that pets may offer many of the same emotional benefits as human relationships. That’s why Gschwandtner believes policymakers should make it easier for people to have pets — for example by changing housing rules that limit them.

But not all experts agree that pets can fully replace human connections.

"We know that social support and emotional support are really key aspects of human-pet relationships that are also the same types of support we get from our human social connections. … While animals are connected to us in powerful ways, they are not the same as humans," said Megan Mueller, a professor at Tufts University who studies human-animal relationships.

More information

The Ohio State University Veterinary Medical Center has more on the health benefits of pet ownership.

SOURCE: CNN, April 9, 2025