Something happened in 2024 that has never happened before in the UK. More adults now vape than smoke. According to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, 10.0% of adults in Great Britain currently use an e-cigarette, compared with 9.1% who smoke cigarettes. That is the first time those two lines have crossed since records began.
Smoking itself is also at its lowest level on record. Around 5.3 million adults, 10.6% of the population, currently smoke cigarettes, the lowest proportion since the ONS started tracking this in 2011.
As someone who spends an unreasonable amount of time working out what things actually cost, this felt like a good moment to dig into the numbers properly. Is vaping really the money saver it gets sold as? And if it is, what is the catch, because there is always a catch.
How We Got Here
It is worth remembering how recent some of this is. The indoor smoking ban in England came into force in July 2007, covering pubs, restaurants, workplaces and pretty much every enclosed public space. Plain packaging followed in 2017, and shops have not been allowed to display cigarettes on open shelves for years now.
Behind all of that has been a steady, deliberate increase in tobacco duty, almost always rising faster than inflation, year after year. The combined effect has been dramatic. Smoking prevalence in the UK was around 25% back in 2007. It is now 10.6%, less than half.
The biggest shift has been among younger adults. Smoking among 18 to 24 year olds has fallen from 25.7% in 2011 to 8.1% in 2024, a drop of nearly 18 percentage points. That is the kind of generational change that genuinely reshapes a country’s habits, not just a policy tweak at the edges.
It is not all one direction everywhere, though. Cancer Research UK has pointed out that the fall has been fastest in the North of England, where rates have nearly halved over the past 18 years, while progress in some other regions has slowed considerably. So the headline number is real, but it is not evenly spread.
What a Smoking Habit Actually Costs in 2026
Here is where the numbers get genuinely eye watering. In 2007, a pack of 20 cigarettes cost around £5.33. In early 2026, the average is closer to £16.50, with premium brands pushing past £18. That is more than triple in under twenty years, well ahead of general inflation.
Here is what that works out to over a year, depending on how much someone smokes:
| Habit | Cost per day | Cost per year |
|---|---|---|
| 10 a day | £8.25 | £3,010 |
| 20 a day | £16.50 | £6,020 |
| 30 a day | £24.75 | £9,030 |
A 20 a day habit is now over £6,000 a year. That is more than a lot of people’s council tax, car insurance and TV licence combined, just on cigarettes.
What Vaping Costs Instead
Disposable vapes were banned in the UK from 1 June 2025, so the cheapest legal options now are refillable pod kits and refillable vape kits using nicotine salt e-liquid. Costs vary a fair bit depending on how much someone uses, but a reasonable working range looks like this.
| Usage level | Approx cost per month | Approx cost per year |
|---|---|---|
| Lighter use (around 4 x 10ml nic salt bottles) | £50 to £60 | £600 to £720 |
| Heavier use (around 9 x 10ml nic salt bottles, plus pods) | £80 to £100 | £960 to £1,200 |
Put those two tables side by side and someone switching from a 20 a day smoking habit to vaping could be looking at savings of somewhere between £4,800 and £5,400 a year. That is not a rounding error. That is a holiday, a decent chunk of a car, or several years of the coffee habit I wrote about here, just from switching what you are inhaling.
Before You Get Too Excited About the Savings
Those numbers are accurate for right now, but they will not stay still. A new Vaping Products Duty is due to come in on 1 October 2026, the same day as the next tobacco duty increase. That is not a coincidence. HMRC has been fairly open that the aim is to keep the price gap between smoking and vaping wide, which is good news if you are trying to encourage smokers to switch, but it does mean vaping is about to get a bit more expensive than it is today.
The gap will almost certainly remain large. Vaping is not about to become as expensive as smoking. But if you have seen claims online that vaping is “basically free” by comparison, treat those with a bit of caution. The real number is “significantly cheaper, and likely to stay that way, but not static.”
Is Vaping Actually Replacing Smoking, Though?
This is where the story gets more complicated than “people switched and saved money,” and it is the bit I think gets glossed over the most.
Action on Smoking and Health’s 2025 youth survey found that 20% of 11 to 17 year olds in Great Britain have tried vaping, around 1.1 million children, and 7% currently vape, about 400,000. Of the children who have ever tried vaping, close to four in ten had never smoked a cigarette first.
So a meaningful chunk of young vapers are not ex smokers, or smokers cutting down. They are a genuinely new group who went straight to vaping without cigarettes ever being part of the picture. That is a different story to “vaping is helping people quit,” even if both things are true at once.
There is also a counterintuitive twist. While adult smoking keeps falling, the same ASH survey found that the proportion of 11 to 17 year olds who have ever smoked a cigarette rose from 14% in 2023 to 21% in 2025. So even as the overall national trend points firmly downwards, the picture among teenagers in the last couple of years has not been moving in quite the same direction.
What We Actually Know About the Health Side
I am not a doctor, and this is not health advice, but it felt wrong to write an article about the cost of vaping versus smoking without at least being honest about what is and is not known.
ASH’s own position is fairly measured. For adults who smoke and switch to vaping, the evidence suggests vaping carries a small fraction of the risk of smoking, with significantly lower exposure to the substances linked to cancer and heart and lung disease. That is the basis for the NHS recommending vaping as a quit aid for adult smokers.
But “much less risky than smoking” is not the same as “risk free,” particularly for people who would never have smoked in the first place. Short term effects that have been reported include coughing, headaches, dizziness and sore throats, and the long term picture, especially for people who start vaping young and have never smoked, is still genuinely being researched. Nobody has had a vape in their hand for forty years yet, so nobody can honestly tell you what forty years of vaping looks like.
There is also a strange shift in perception worth noting. Back in 2013, around 73% of young people correctly identified vaping as less harmful than smoking. By 2023, that had fallen to 33%, and ASH’s 2025 survey found 63% of young people now believe vaping is as harmful as smoking, or more harmful. The actual evidence has not moved that dramatically. The headlines around it clearly have.
So, Is It Worth Switching?
If you currently smoke and you are thinking about switching to vaping, the financial case is genuinely strong. Even allowing for the duty changes coming in October 2026, you are likely looking at savings of somewhere around £4,000 to £5,000 a year for a typical smoking habit. That is before any health benefits at all, purely on cost.
If you do not currently smoke or vape at all, none of this is really an argument for starting either, and the youth figures above are a reasonable reminder of why.
For anyone currently smoking and wanting to quit altogether rather than switch, NHS Smokefree is worth a look, they have free support and it is specifically built around quitting rather than substituting.
And if you do end up saving a few thousand pounds a year by switching, it is worth doing something deliberate with it rather than letting it just get absorbed back into everyday spending the way subscriptions and small recurring costs tend to, something I wrote about here. Even putting half of it into a savings account makes a real difference over a few years, and my compound interest calculator is a quick way to see what that could look like.
For more on this kind of everyday cost breakdown, my spending habits guide rounds up the rest of what I have looked into so far.