The idea that money can't buy happiness past a certain point is being challenged by contemporary research showing that well-being keeps rising even at very high incomes.

Money keeps increasing happiness "well beyond" incomes of $500,000 per year, a research paper by Matthew Killingsworth, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, said. 

"The more money people earn, the happier they tend to be in the moments of life," according to Killingsworth. "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."

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In 2010, a study led by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate and economist at Princeton University, found that happiness and emotional well-being make no progress beyond an income level of $75,000.

Killingsworth compared average-income people with high net-worth individuals and found that the positive association between money and happiness continues beyond the "range of virtually all previous studies of money and happiness."

The study was based on the TrackYourHappiness.org project, which gathered 1.7 million reports from over 33,000 U.S. adults, measuring their happiness alongside household income and overall life satisfaction.

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‘It Will Never Reach a Plateau'

While Killingsworth acknowledges that the impact of each additional dollar on happiness begins to diminish at higher income levels, he emphasizes that this does not create a strict plateau.

The link between happiness and income keeps rising and shows no clear limit, Killingsworth wrote.

"It will never reach a plateau," he said 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." 

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