BackgroundThe psychological situation of high school students during adolescence is not promising, and the most obvious manifestation is the lack of subjective well-being (SWB). This network analysis presents a model of the interaction and correlation between different items of SWB, identifying the most central items for high school students.MethodsThrough offline and online surveys, 4,378 questionnaires were sent out and finally 4,282 Chinese high school students were available. The response rate was 97.807%. The study used the eLASSO method to estimate the network structure and centrality measures. This algorithm used the EBIC to select the best neighbor factor for each node.ResultsThe average age for high school students was 16.320 years old and the average SWB score was 76.680. The distribution of SWB between male and female students was significant different (P< 0.001). S8 (Have you been anxious, worried, or upset) was the node with the highest strength and expected influence. The network structure and centrality remained stable after discarding 75% of the sample at random. Except for S15 (How concerned or worried about your health have you been), all nodes were positively correlated with each other (P< 0.01). The network structure of SWB was similar for female and male students (network strength: 8.482 for male participants; 8.323 for female participants;P= 0.159), as well as for rural and urban students (network strength: 8.500 for rural students; 8.315 for urban students;P= 0.140).ConclusionTargeting S8 (Have you been anxious, worried, or upset) as a potential intervention target may increase high school students’ SWB effectively.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12889-023-16156-y.