Life satisfaction, defined as the overall cognitive judgement of one’s life (Diener et al., 1985), is an ultimate goal in human existence and has a number of further positive concomitants, e.g., having more friends and being healthier (Diener and Biswas-Diener, 2008). Work and organizational psychologists are recognizing that life satisfaction might also be an important issue in their field (Abele et al., 2016; Erdogan et al., 2012) as it is positively related to job performance ( Jones, 2006) and to lower turnover intentions (Rode et al., 2007). As a consequence, life satisfaction is a desirable goal for both an individual and the organization. It is therefore important to know how working conditions and the subjective experience of one’s work and career affect an individual’s life satisfaction. In our present research, we are specifically concerned with if and how the experience of one’s career, i.e., career satisfaction, affects life satisfaction. Career satisfaction refers to the evaluation of the accumulated experiences in one’s career so far. It is a promising addition to research on life satisfaction and job satisfaction (Bowling et al., 2010; Judge et al., 1998) because it takes a long-term perspective to work experiences, and because it is a salient indicator of a person’s evaluation of the overall work domain. Whereas some studies (Rode, 2004; Near and Rechner, 1993) suggest that the effect of work domain on life satisfaction is weak compared to non-work domains, a review by Erdogan et al. (2012) revealed that the relatively weak association of work domain satisfaction with life satisfaction might be a result in former studies of biased samples. Further, existing studies dealing with career satisfaction and life satisfaction are mostly cross-sectional (e.g. Burke et al., 1999; Todd et al., 2009). Thus, the first aim of our study is to examine the relationship between career satisfaction and life satisfaction not only within, but also across time. Based on the theoretical framework from Campbell et al. (1976), there are three alternative theoretical perspectives with regard to the direction of influence between career satisfaction and life satisfaction, but little is known yet about which of them best describes the association between these two constructs. From an applied perspective, it makes a difference whether career satisfaction shapes life satisfaction or whether life satisfaction affects career satisfaction or both show a reciprocal influence. In the first case, work-related interventions should be in the focus as these may affect career satisfaction; in the latter two cases, a more global focus on both work-related measures and employees’ work-life balance would be taken. Thus, the direction of influence between career satisfaction and life satisfaction is of both theoretical and applied interest and it is the second aim of our study. To address these aims, we will present two longitudinal studies with three points of measurement each. Study 1 was conducted with a large sample of professionals who were approached three times with long time intervals between measures (overall five years). Study 2 was also a three-wave longitudinal research. Now, the time intervals between measures were much shorter ( four weeks each), and we additionally included work centrality as a possible moderator (Rain et al., 1991; Rice et al., 1980).