Smoking Cessation Has Accelerated Since the Rise of Vaping
On October 6, 2026, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published its report on adult smoking habits in the United Kingdom. The report found that 9.8% of adults smoked in 2025, a decrease of 0.8 percentage points compared with the previous year, “continuing a long-term downward trend.” In 2011, at the beginning of this time series, the ONS reported that 20.2% of people in the UK smoked. The proportion of smokers has therefore fallen by more than half (-51.5%) in fourteen years.
At the same time, e-cigarette use has increased. According to another ONS survey, the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (OPN), which covers people aged 16 and over in Great Britain, 9.9% of adults vaped daily or occasionally in 2025, compared with 6.4% in 2020. This figure is very slightly lower than in 2024 (-0.1 percentage points), but remains higher than the smoking rate measured by the same survey (8.7%).
Great Britain would therefore have around 5.4 million vapers and 4.8 million smokers. “This continues the trend seen in 2024, when e-cigarette use exceeded cigarette smoking for the first time,” the statistics office noted.
While these figures alone cannot establish causality, the chart published by the ONS provides an overview of the situation in Great Britain:
Between 1980 and 1994, smoking declined sharply, from 39.4% to 26.8%. It then stagnated until 2000, resumed its decline until 2007, and then plateaued at around 20% until 2012. Since then, the decline has resumed, reaching 8.7% in 2025. This decrease coincides with the period during which e-cigarettes began to gain popularity.
The chart also shows that, since 2014, when the ONS began tracking vaping, the proportion of former regular smokers who had quit rose from 54.6% to 74.1%, whereas it had increased by only around 6 percentage points over the previous twenty years. This trend could suggest that traditional tobacco-control measures, such as tax increases or smoking bans, become less effective as the number of smokers declines. The remaining smokers may be less responsive to these levers, and for some of these “last smokers,” e-cigarettes may have provided a way out that conventional policies did not offer.
An analysis by University College London (UCL) published in Thorax in 2019 also found a sharp increase in the smoking cessation rate in Great Britain after 2013.1 Another study by the same team2, published in the BMJ in 2016, linked the rise in vaping in England to an increase in the success rate of quit attempts.
At the individual level, a Cochrane review concludes, with a high level of certainty, that e-cigarettes help more people quit smoking than nicotine replacement therapy.3
While these data do not prove a causal relationship at the national level, particularly because the period also coincides with other measures such as plain packaging, they are consistent with the idea that vaping may have taken over where traditional tools were losing momentum. This interpretation remains debated.
Sources
1 Beard, E., West, R., Jarvis, M., Michie, S., & Brown, J. (2019). ‘S’-shaped curve: Modelling trends in smoking prevalence, uptake and cessation in Great Britain from 1973 to 2016. Thorax, 74(9), 875–881. https://doi.org/10.1136/thoraxjnl-2018-212740
2 Beard, E., West, R., Michie, S., & Brown, J. (2016). Association between electronic cigarette use and changes in quit attempts, success of quit attempts, use of smoking cessation pharmacotherapy, and use of stop smoking services in England: Time series analysis of population trends. BMJ, 354, Article i4645. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.i4645
3 Lindson, N., Livingstone-Banks, J., Butler, A. R., McRobbie, H., Bullen, C. R., Hajek, P., Wu, A. D., Begh, R., Theodoulou, A., Ma, C., Notley, C., Rigotti, N. A., Turner, T., Fanshawe, T., & Hartmann-Boyce, J. (2026). Electronic cigarettes for smoking cessation. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2026(8), Article CD010216. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD010216.pub11
