Recently, the discourse surrounding the role of students’ well-being and its effects on learning motivation and academic achievement has gained more and more attention in the national and international research community and on the stakeholders’ level. Quality teacher-student relationships, social-emotional support from teachers, a sense of belonging at school, and achievement-related anxiety are often highlighted as important aspects of students’ well-being and have been confirmed in various studies (e.g. Barosso et al., 2020; Harding et al., 2019; Kozina, 2020; Shriver & Buffett, 2015) as significant predictors of both academic motivation and achievement. The latest PISA 2022 results for Slovenia show that, compared to their OECD peers, Slovenian 15-year-olds reported significantly below-average levels of all mentioned aspects of well-being. Since Slovenia also witnessed a significant decline in all three literacy domains in PISA 2022, the article fills the research gap in investigating the role of different aspects of students’ well-being in explaining students’ academic motivation and achievement. For the data analysis, we used the data from the PISA 2022 survey, which in Slovenia includes a representative sample of 6.721 students aged 15. From the 2022 questionnaire, we used separate scales addressing students’ well-being: perceived quality of teacher-student relationships, teacher support in mathematics class, sense of belonging at school, mathematics-related anxiety, and mathematics effort and persistency scale as an indicator of student’s academic motivation. For academic achievement, we used plausible values for all three PISA literacy domains scales. The internal consistency parameters and the multicollinearity between the variables were checked in the Slovenian sample. We used the linear regression procedure to analyse the size effects of different predictors when explaining students’ academic motivation and achievement using the statistical program IEA IDB Analyzer (Version 5.0.23), which, due to two-stage sampling in the PISA study, allows the use of individual students and sample weights. The results show that all four aspects of students’ well-being were confirmed as significant predictors of students’ academic motivation, with the highest effect sizes for the quality of teacher-student relationships and math-related anxiety. The results also showed that the quality of teacher-student relationships is the most significant predictor of academic achievement on all three PISA literacy scales. Following these findings, it is thus crucial to establish a system for strengthening the social-emotional competencies of Slovenian teachers and students and shift an education strategy to a more holistic approach that supports the strengthening of different aspects of students’ and teachers’ well-being.

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