We compare multidimensional poverty and its associations with perceived happiness in China, Japan and Korea. Using largely comparable nationwide survey data, we focus on multidimensional poverty in terms of income, schooling, health and social protection. We find multidimensional poverty to be more prevalent in China than in Japan or Korea; sex and age‐based differences are largest in Korea. We further confirm significant associations between multidimensional poverty and perceived happiness. For all three countries, the aggregated poverty dimensions could largely identify unhappy individuals, with both wider coverage and higher odds than is possible through unidimensional analyses.