Every so often a research finding escapes the journal, sheds its footnotes, and arrives in your group chat wearing a dollar sign. This is one of those. In the spring of 2025, economists reported that living with a dog or cat lifts life satisfaction by roughly the same amount as being married, and they put a number on it: about £70,000 a year, or somewhere near $90,000 depending on the day’s exchange rate.
The number is real. It came out of a peer-reviewed paper in Social Indicators Research by Michael Gmeiner of the London School of Economics and Adelina Gschwandtner of the University of Kent. But if you read it as “my cat is secretly paying me six figures,” you have taken the least interesting thing from a genuinely interesting study. The dollar sign is a translation device, not a valuation. And what it translates is worth understanding, because it changes how you should think about the animal asleep on your couch.
What the researchers actually did
They did not survey people about how much their pets are worth. Nobody was asked to name a price, which is a good thing, because people are terrible at that.
Instead they used a technique economists call the life satisfaction approach. You take a large survey where people rate their overall satisfaction with life on a simple scale, in this case one to seven. You also record everything else about them: income, health, marital status, how often they see friends, whether they live with a dog or a cat. Then you work out how much extra income it would take to move someone’s satisfaction score by the same amount that some non-purchasable thing moves it.
That last part is the trick. The method exists precisely for things that have no price tag. It has been used to estimate what people would pay to avoid living under an airport flight path, and what friendly neighbors are worth. Clean air, quiet streets, company. The money figure is a common unit, the way you might convert two currencies to compare them. It is not a check anyone is writing.
The data came from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, drawing on responses from roughly 2,500 households. Around a fifth of them lived with a dog or a cat.
The finding, stated honestly
Living with a pet was associated with a meaningful lift in life satisfaction. Convert that lift into its income equivalent, and you land around £70,000 a year. Prior work using the same method produced a similar figure for marriage, and a similar figure for seeing friends or relatives regularly.
So the accurate headline is not “pets are worth as much as a spouse.” It is: the satisfaction bump from regular, reliable companionship is large, and it shows up whether that companionship arrives as a partner, a standing Sunday dinner with your sister, or a cat who reappears at 6 a.m. demanding breakfast. The pet is not beating marriage. Companionship is beating loneliness, and pets turn out to be a real supplier of it.
That reframing matters because it tells you where the effect is coming from. It is not the species. It is the daily, unfailing fact of another creature in the room.
“The study didn’t find a magic property in dogs and cats,” says Dr. Amara Solis. “It found that steady companionship moves people, and that animals are unusually good at supplying the steady part. They don’t cancel. They don’t drift. That reliability is doing a lot of the work here.”
Where the number gets shaky, and why you should still care
Be a little suspicious of any single figure this clean. Three honest caveats.
The sample is modest and British. A few thousand households in one country, in one survey panel. That is a respectable dataset, not a global census.
Selection is a real problem, and the authors knew it. Happier, more social, more financially comfortable people may simply be more likely to get a pet in the first place. The paper uses statistical methods designed to push back on that, but no observational study fully escapes it. Nobody randomly assigns puppies.
Averages hide the wreckage. The mean effect being positive does not mean every person is helped. Anyone who has lived through a bad match, a reactive dog in a small apartment, or a vet bill that ate the rent knows the distribution has a left tail.
None of which makes the study useless. It makes it what it is: reasonably strong evidence that, on average, sharing your life with an animal registers on the same scale as the other things we already organize our lives around.
The part nobody quotes
Buried under the money headline is the more charming finding. The researchers also looked at personality, and dog people and cat people are not the same people.
Pet owners overall skewed more open, more conscientious, and more extroverted than non-owners. Splitting them up: cat people scored higher on openness and conscientiousness than dog people, and also higher on neuroticism. Dog people came out more agreeable and considerably more extroverted.
Resist the urge to make this a personality quiz. It is a correlation in a survey, not a diagnosis. But it does suggest the two groups may be getting somewhat different things out of the arrangement, which is exactly what you would expect from two species that ask completely different things of you.
What this is good for
The practical use of this study is not bragging. It is budgeting, in the broadest sense.
Pet companionship is not a luxury line item that sits below “real” wellbeing spending. It is sitting, in the data, next to marriage and close friendship. That is a reasonable argument for taking the relationship seriously: for paying for the training that keeps the dog livable, for the vet visit you have been putting off, for the pet-friendly apartment that costs a bit more.
The physiology backs up the vibe. Time with animals is associated with lower blood pressure, oxytocin release, and measurable stress reduction, which is why animal-assisted interventions turn up in settings from PTSD care for veterans to pediatric emergency departments to university exam weeks.
It is also, quietly, an argument for something harder. If the mechanism is companionship and routine, then a pet is not a substitute for human connection, and the study does not say it is. It says both count. Someone lonely enough to be reading a headline that says their cat is worth $90,000 deserves the whole finding, not the flattering half.
What newer research adds
The study landed in March 2025 and got the full viral treatment, which means the number traveled much further than the caveats did. Worth keeping straight as you see it recycled:
The paper is an economics paper, not a health paper. It measures self-reported life satisfaction, not lifespan, not blood pressure, not depression scores. It is one method’s answer to one question.
And the money figure will keep drifting in the retelling. You will see £70,000, $90,000, $93,000, “a six-figure raise.” They are all the same estimate passed through different exchange rates and different rounding. If someone quotes you a precise dollar amount for your dog, they are quoting a conversion, not a discovery.
The finding that holds up, and the one worth carrying around: the company of an animal registers on the same scale as the biggest social goods in life. You do not need to believe the price tag to believe that.
References
- Gmeiner, M. & Gschwandtner, A. (2025). The Value of Pets: The Quantifiable Impact of Pets on Life Satisfaction. Social Indicators Research
- University of Kent / LSE: New study suggests pets increase human life satisfaction and well-being (phys.org)
- UK Household Longitudinal Study (Understanding Society)
- CNN: Pets could boost wellbeing as much as a wife or husband, study suggests
