Smoking costs a lot, and in more ways than you’d think. We all know a pack of cigarettes is expensive, but charity Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) estimates that smoking costs society in England £16.5bn a year.
The cost to you
In 2024, the average cost of a pack of 20 king size filter cigarettes was around £15, and people who smoke in England spent £12.1bn in total on tobacco, averaging £2,338 per smoker. If you’ve smoked like this for 10 years, that’s a whopping £23,380 you’ve spent on cigarettes.
Cigarettes used to be a lot cheaper. The RPI figure for the average cost of the same pack of 20 cigarettes in 1987 was just £1.43. If we account for inflation, that’s £3.34 in today’s money, so you can see how much the cost has increased.
This is because we know smoking cigarettes is bad for our health, so the cost of cigarettes is high to try and discourage people from smoking. The cost of cigarettes will continue to rise, so if you keep smoking, you’ll have to pay more and more.
The cost to the NHS
Smoking is directly responsible for a wide range of illnesses. NHS statistics reveal that in one year (2019-2020), 506,100 hospital admissions were attributable to smoking in those aged 35 and over.
Smoking is one of the biggest strains on our healthcare system, with ASH finding that it costs the NHS £1.82bn a year.
The cost not only concerns hospital admissions and other treatment for smoking-related illnesses, but the cost of social care too. People who smoke are more likely to require both care in the home and residential care at a younger age than those who don’t smoke.
The cost to the economy
There’s a high cost to the economy too, as workers who smoke are more likely to become ill and out of work while still of working age, costing £27.6bn in missed productivity. There’s also the added cost of missed work due to smoking-related illnesses.
The cost to the environment
It’s not just your health that suffers when you smoke. The environment is also damaged by smoking, with a 2022 report from the World Health Organisation (WHO) detailing the impact cigarettes have on the world.
According to the WHO’s report Tobacco: Poisoning Our Planet, producing cigarettes takes 600 million trees, 200,000 hectares of land, 22 billion tonnes of water and 84 million tonnes of CO2.
The tobacco industry’s high carbon footprint contributes hugely to global warming, and the low-income countries where most tobacco is grown sacrifice land and other resources for tobacco when they could be used to grow food for the region.
That’s not the end of smoking’s impact on the earth – the toxic chemicals in cigarettes are released into the environment, and it’s estimated that 4.5 trillion cigarette filters end up in our oceans and rivers, or are littered on beaches, in parks or on pavements. 2 million tonnes of packaging waste is created from cigarettes each year too.
The impact of smoking on the planet is so big that the WHO calls it not only a health threat, but a threat to human development as a whole.
