Remember when everyone said money can't buy happiness after you hit a certain income? Turns out that might be wrong.

Contemporary research is flipping that conventional wisdom on its head, showing that well-being actually keeps climbing even at very high income levels. According to a paper by Matthew Killingsworth, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, money keeps boosting happiness "well beyond" incomes of $500,000 per year.

"The more money people earn, the happier they tend to be in the moments of life," Killingsworth explained. "And this upward association appears to extend across a wide range of income levels, including well beyond a previously-accepted satiation threshold of $75,000/y."

The Old Theory Gets Challenged

Back in 2010, a study led by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate and economist at Princeton University, concluded that happiness and emotional well-being plateau beyond an income level of $75,000. That finding became widely cited and shaped how many people thought about the money-happiness relationship.

But Killingsworth's research paints a different picture. He compared average-income people with high net-worth individuals and discovered that the positive connection between money and happiness continues beyond the "range of virtually all previous studies of money and happiness."

The research wasn't based on a small sample, either. The study drew from the TrackYourHappiness.org project, which collected 1.7 million reports from over 33,000 U.S. adults, measuring their happiness alongside household income and overall life satisfaction.

Diminishing Returns, But No Hard Ceiling

Now, Killingsworth isn't saying every extra dollar has the same impact. He acknowledges that the effect of each additional dollar on happiness does start to diminish at higher income levels. The difference between making $50,000 and $100,000 probably feels bigger than the jump from $500,000 to $550,000.

But here's the key point: diminishing returns doesn't mean the returns stop completely. The link between happiness and income keeps rising and shows no clear limit, according to his findings.

"It will never reach a plateau," Killingsworth wrote in the paper. "There may well be some income threshold in the real world beyond which happiness fails to increase, but the point to recognize here is that the existence of a plateau is not predicted mathematically."

So while we might instinctively think there's some magic number where more money stops mattering, the data suggests that point, if it exists at all, is much higher than anyone previously thought.