Is Vaping Cheaper Than Smoking?

Yes, and by a wide margin. A twenty-a-day smoker spends somewhere around £6,000 a year on cigarettes. Vaping the same amount of nicotine on a refillable kit costs roughly £500 to £800 a year, even once the new vaping duty starts in October 2026.

That gap is not closing, either. Tobacco duty rises on the same day the vape tax lands, so the difference between the two actually gets wider. Here is the honest arithmetic.

What smoking costs

A pack of 20 in the UK runs to about £16.50, and closer to £19 for some brands. From 1 October 2026 tobacco duty goes up again, adding roughly 50p to a pack once VAT is on top.

If you smoke	Cost a week	Cost a year
10 a day	About £58	About £3,000
20 a day	About £116	About £6,000
30 a day	About £174	About £9,000

Six thousand pounds is a holiday, a second-hand car, or a decent chunk of a deposit. It is the number most smokers never sit down and work out, because it arrives ten or fifteen pounds at a time.

What vaping costs, including the 2026 tax

From 1 October 2026 a Vaping Products Duty of 22p per millilitre applies to all e-liquid, plus VAT, which works out at roughly 26p per ml at the till. It is a flat rate, so it applies whether your liquid is 20 mg or 0 mg.

The important detail is that the duty only lands on the liquid. Coils, pods, kits and batteries are not taxed at all. That is why how you vape matters far more to your bill than the tax does.

How you vape	Roughly per ml, after tax	Cost a year, at 3 ml a day
Refillable kit with shortfills and nic shots	About 38p	About £500
Refillable kit with 10 ml nic salts	About 61p	About £780
Prefilled pods, bought weekly	Higher again	£1,000 and up

Those figures include coils. Even at the expensive end, you are looking at a fraction of what smoking costs. Put your own numbers in with our vaping versus smoking savings calculator and see what you would actually save.

The bit most people get wrong about the vape tax

When the duty was announced, plenty of people assumed it would wipe out the savings. It does not come close.

The duty costs a typical vaper around 79p a day, or about £290 a year. That is real money, and it is fair to be annoyed about it. But the tobacco duty on twenty cigarettes a day is many times larger, and it goes up on exactly the same day. The government is taxing both, but it is still taxing smoking far harder, deliberately.

So after October 2026, a twenty-a-day smoker still spends roughly £6,200 a year, and a refillable vaper still spends roughly £500. The gap widens rather than closes. You can see exactly what the duty adds to whatever you buy with the vape tax calculator.

How to make vaping as cheap as it can be

Refill rather than buying prefilled pods

This is the single biggest lever, and it is bigger than the tax. A refillable pod kit with your own e-liquid will always beat buying prefilled pods, because you are paying for liquid rather than for a new plastic pod every time.

Buy in bigger bottles

The duty per millilitre is the same whatever the bottle size, but the liquid underneath it is cheaper per ml in a 100 ml shortfill than in a 10 ml nic salt. If your device suits shortfills, that is where the savings sit.

Make your coils last longer

Coils are not taxed, but they are a running cost, and sweet dessert liquids kill them fastest. Priming a new coil properly and vaping at the recommended wattage can double how long it lasts. Our coil and pod life calculator will show you what yours is costing you a year.

Do not chase the cheapest liquid

A liquid you do not enjoy is a liquid you go back to cigarettes over. The saving is only real if you actually stick with it.

How many cigarettes are in a pack, a carton and a pouch?

Worth pinning down, because all the sums above depend on it, and the answers are not as obvious as people assume once you get past the pack itself.

What it is	How many cigarettes
A pack of cigarettes (UK)	20. Packs of 10 were banned in 2017, so 20 is now the legal minimum
A carton or sleeve	200, which is ten packs of 20
A 30 g pouch of rolling tobacco	Roughly 40 to 60 roll-ups, depending how tightly you roll
A 50 g pouch of rolling tobacco	Roughly 65 to 100 roll-ups
Your duty-free allowance	200 cigarettes, or 250 g of tobacco

Rolling your own is cheaper per cigarette than buying packs, which is why plenty of smokers switch to it when money gets tight. It is worth being clear that it is not any safer. Hand-rolled cigarettes still burn tobacco, which is the part that does the damage, and rolling tobacco carries duty in the same way. Cutting the cost of smoking is not the same as cutting the harm of it.

Note that a 30 g pouch is now the legal minimum size in the UK too, for the same reason as the 20-pack: making the smallest purchase bigger makes it harder to buy on impulse.

Would bringing cigarettes back from abroad change the maths?

Barely. Your duty-free allowance is 200 cigarettes, which is ten days of smoking for a twenty-a-day smoker. Max it out on two trips a year and you have covered about 5% of your cigarettes, knocking roughly £250 off a £6,000 bill.

Even in a world where every cigarette you smoked cost duty-free money, you would spend around £2,000 a year. Refillable vaping, tax included, is about £500. Vaping wins even against cigarettes with no UK duty on them at all. Our duty-free allowance calculator goes through it properly.

It was never only about the money

The NHS is clear that vaping is substantially less harmful than smoking and one of the most effective ways to stop. It is not risk-free, and if you do not smoke you should not start. But if you do smoke, the cost is only the most obvious of the reasons to switch, and it is the easiest one to prove on a calculator.

If you are thinking about making the change, our step-by-step switch plan will get you set up with the right kit and the right strength, and free help is available from your local Stop Smoking Service.

The actual numbers

Here is the honest position, and we'll show you where every figure comes from, because most of the ones you'll see quoted online are made up.

Round it off and it's roughly £6,000 a year to smoke 20 a day, against roughly £450 a year to vape. Even after the vape tax lands, that gap doesn't close, because tobacco duty goes up on exactly the same day.

Two things nobody else will tell you about these numbers

The official cigarette price is out of date. The ONS series that everyone quotes for the price of a pack stopped being updated in January 2025. There is no official 2026 figure. Anyone quoting you a precise "average price today" is guessing. Adding the duty rises since then puts a pack somewhere around £17 to £18 now, but we're telling you that's our estimate, not a statistic.

The vaping figure is three years old and predates the tax. HMRC's £8.60 a week came from a survey done in July 2023. It's the only authoritative UK number there is, and we'd rather give you a real one with its age attached than invent a fresh one. Once duty lands in October, expect it to rise.

Where the savings actually come from

The device is a one-off. The liquid is the running cost, and that's where the gap opens up. A vape kit and a few bottles of nic salts will cost you a fraction of what 20 a day costs, and a refillable kit with shortfills is cheaper again per millilitre.

Whatever you choose, it comes out of the same e-liquid range. The cheapest way to vape is the way you'll actually stick to.