With the development of compulsory education, the percentage and level of receiving education has been increasing year by year, but people's subjective well‐being does not seem to be closely and synchronously linked with it. In order to further investigate the mechanism of the relationship between education and subjective well‐being, and to provide a basis and suggestions for deepening the reform of education in China, we use data from the China General Social Survey 2017, introducing three mediating variables of subjective social status, income and health level, and use ordered logit model for regression analysis. The results show that in China, the level of education mainly affects individual subjective well‐being by influencing their subjective social status. Secondly, it affects subjective well‐being by affecting health. Economic factor is the least effective mediating variable. The research results prove that among Chinese residents, non-economic mediating factors have a stronger impact on subjective well‐being than economic factors. Among them, subjective social status is the most important influencing factor.