Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the mediating effect of resilience on the relationship between emotional labor and happiness of clinical nurses. Methods: A descriptive, cross-sectional study was conducted with 224 clinical nurses who had one or more years of clinical experiences from four general hospitals in D city in Korea. Data collected from the survey using self-reported questionnaires were analyzed by t-test, one-way ANOVA, Pearson's correlation coefficients, and multiple regression analysis using IBM SPSS statistics 21.0 program. Results: There were statistically significant correlations among variables; a negative correlation between happiness and emotional labor, a positive correlation between happiness and resilience, and a negative correlation between emotional labor and resilience. Meanwhile, resilience had a partial mediating effect on the relationship between emotional labor and happiness. That is, resilience can play an important role between emotional labor and happiness of clinical nurses as a mediator. Conclusion: Considering the findings of this study, developing programs that can improve resilience of clinical nurses who experience emotional labor are needed to increase their level of happiness. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc/3.0), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.