We have a wealth of robust evaluations – using validated health and wellbeing measures – but no straightforward way to convert these into WELLBYs, the Treasury’s accepted wellbeing value.
Today, Mission Economics and the London School of Economics are launching Map My WELLBY – a free tool that ‘maps’ a range of measures onto the WELLBY, for economic evaluation.
The Problem
The WELLBY (wellbeing-adjusted life year) is the government’s recommended method for valuing subjective wellbeing in policy appraisal. A one point improvement in life satisfaction (on a 0–10 scale), sustained for a year, is valued at around £16,500 in today’s prices.
It hinges on a single, reliable survey question: Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?
In practice, few evaluations ask this question directly. Where researchers use other validated wellbeing measures, they have no easy route to wellbeing valuation.
Health economists addressed a similar challenge by developing ‘mapping functions’ – convert various health measures into their common economic currency, the QALY (quality-adjusted life year). Wellbeing economics needed the same.
The Story Behind the Tool
As Lord O’Donnell et al. (2014) observed:
“A great deal of today’s project evaluation is devoted more to finding out about the outcomes, rather than valuing them… The subsequent cost-benefit analysis is typically seen as a relatively straightforward tailpiece.”
When I worked at the Department for Education, that gap between impact and valuation was a regular frustration. We used measures like the SDQ for children’s social and emotional development, or SWEMWBS for wellbeing, without a clear route to valuation. This mattered when it came to making the case for investment in child wellbeing, to those who hold the purse strings (like the Treasury).
At DfE, I commissioned the LSE to explore whether it was possible to ‘map’ child wellbeing measures to the WELLBY. I coined the term “C-WELLBY” to describe this approach. Isaac Parkes has since led that analysis and published two papers earlier this year:
- Parkes, I. (2025). Mapping Functions for Wellbeing Measures to Generate WELLBYs for Use in Economic Evaluation. CEP Occasional Paper No. 70.
- Parkes, I. (2025). The C-WELLBY: Towards a Universal Measure of Children’s Wellbeing for Policy Analysis. CEP Occasional Paper No. 69.
Only useful if it’s usable
To apply Isaac’s mapping functions from the paper, researchers would need extract the relevant coefficients, build their own conversion models, and apply inflation adjustments. Everyone repeats the same, fiddly, error-prone steps.
That’s where Map My WELLBY comes in – a reliable, auditable, and user-friendly tool to make help researchers apply Isaac’s fantastic work.
Health economists again showed the way here. Increasingly, they’re replacing brittle Excel tools with R Shiny apps. Organisations like Dark Peak Analytics are upskilling researchers in R Shiny, with York University’s Centre for Health Economics among those converting their leading models into Shiny.
What Map My WELLBY Does
In four simple steps:
- Select your measure – from eight validated instruments commonly used in UK research.
- Define your impact – score changes, participant numbers, duration.
- Monetise – choose a price year; the tool handles inflation adjustments to the Treasury’s monetary value of a WELLBY.
- Review and export – download a report with your WELLBY impacts, monetary values, and methodology.
Example
Your schools programme improves pupils’ mental health, reducing SDQ Total Difficulties scores by two points for 50 children over a year. Enter these figures into Map My WELLBY, and you’ll quickly estimate a wellbeing value of around £280,000.
Who It’s For?
- Government analysts preparing business cases.
- Charities strengthening grant applications.
- Academics conducting cost-effectiveness studies.
If you’ve measured a wellbeing impact and need to demonstrate value for money, Map My WELLBY can help.
Acknowledgements
Map My WELLBY is a collaboration between Mission Economics and the LSE, with special thanks to Isaac Parkes, Christian Krekel, and Sara MacLennan. We hope this tool helps embed mapping as a core technique in wellbeing economics.
Try it today: https://missioneconomics.shinyapps.io/mapmywellby/
Questions? allan@missioneconomics.org