Does Stoptober Work? Stoptober Success Statistics

Does Stoptober work? The best evidence says yes, but not equally every year. England’s first Stoptober in 2012 raised the number of people trying to quit in October by about half and generated an estimated 350,000 extra quit attempts. A later study of 2012 to 2017 found the October boost was real overall, but large in some years and small in others, and bigger when the campaign had more money.

Does Stoptober Work? The Short Answer

Stoptober is England’s national 28-day stop smoking challenge. It launched on 1 October 2012 with a simple goal: get as many smokers as possible to stop on the same day and stay smoke-free for the whole month.

Two independent studies from University College London researchers have measured whether it changes behavior. Both used the Smoking Toolkit Study, a monthly household survey of smokers in England, and compared October with the other months of the year.

• The 2012 launch worked clearly. Quit attempts rose by about 50% in October 2012 compared with the rest of that year.
• The longer run was mixed. From 2012 to 2017 October quit attempts were higher overall, but the boost was large only in 2012 and 2015.
• Money mattered. The effect appeared greater in the high-budget years of 2012 to 2015 than in the lower-budget years of 2016 and 2017.

What neither study measured directly is how many Stoptober quitters stayed smoke-free for good. That is an important gap, and we come back to it below. For how Stoptober compares with other routes, see our data on success rates by method.

Where the 28 Days Idea Comes From

Almost every Stoptober message repeats one claim: if you can stay smoke-free for 28 days, you are five times more likely to quit for good. The government used it on launch day in 2012, and it still appeared in the 2022 and 2023 campaign press releases.

The claim has a traceable origin. The 2014 evaluation paper, written by the campaign’s academic partners, explains that the 28-day challenge was designed as a SMART goal: specific, measurable and achievable. It says smokers who reached the goal “would be at least five times more likely than they were at the start to become permanent ex-smokers”, and it cites a 2008 review by Robert West and John Stapleton in the European Respiratory Review.

Two points are worth keeping in mind. First, “five times more likely” compares your odds at day 28 with your odds on day one, not with people who never tried. Second, the reasoning is that by four weeks most people are past the worst of the cravings and withdrawal symptoms. We could not open the 2008 review itself, so we report the claim as the campaign’s published rationale rather than as a figure we have checked.

If you want a day-by-day version of the challenge, our Stoptober 28-day plan breaks the month into stages.

What the First Evaluation Found

The first evaluation, published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence in 2014, looked at survey data from 31,566 smokers between 2007 and 2012. Before Stoptober existed, October was an ordinary month for quitting. In 2012, October quit attempts jumped well above the rest of the year.

The researchers compared this with No Smoking Day, a one-day event that had generated an estimated 238,000 quit attempts at a cost of around £750,000. Stoptober cost far more, but it produced more attempts and still came out as cost-effective. Its cost per life year gained compared well with other UK anti-tobacco campaigns and with quit-smoking medicines.

The authors were careful about long-term success. To estimate lives saved, they assumed that only 2.5% of the extra quit attempts would end in permanent quitting. That low figure reflects how often any single quit attempt fails. It is also why many people need more than one try, as our research on quit attempts before success explores.

What Happened to Quit Attempts From 2012 to 2017

A second study, published in Nicotine and Tobacco Research in 2020, followed the campaign through its first six years. It used a larger sample and a quasi-experimental design.

The headline is that Stoptober kept working on average. Quit attempts were more common in October during the campaign years and were not before it. However, the lower end of the confidence interval sits at 1.00, right on the line of no effect, and the year-to-year pattern was uneven.

The authors concluded that the increase “was inconsistent across Stoptober campaigns and appears to have been greater when the campaign budget was higher”. They also said future research should find out how many of these extra quit attempts turn into lasting quits.

How Many People Take Part Each Year

Official participation figures come from government press releases and Public Health England’s yearly evaluations. They measure different things in different years, so they are not a single tidy series.

The 2019 row shows why these numbers need care. Public Health England’s official Stoptober evaluations used two tracking surveys that year, and they disagreed sharply: one found 25% of smokers made a Stoptober quit attempt, and the other found 11%. Both are published side by side in the report.

On a cumulative basis, the 2020 evaluation estimated that Stoptober had driven over 2.3 million quit attempts since 2012, based on modeling. We did not find an evaluation of any campaign after 2020 published on GOV.UK.

The NHS Better Health channel’s Stoptober video explains how the challenge and its free support work.

Why the Effect Faded and What Changed

The evaluations point to three reasons the October boost weakened after the first few years.

1. The budget was cut

Media spending fell from £3.1 million in 2015 to £390,000 in 2016. Public Health England’s own modeling estimated that campaign-driven quit attempts dropped from 385,000 in 2015 to 124,500 in 2016. Spending partly recovered in 2017, but it never returned to the 2015 level in the years with published evaluations.

2. Fewer smokers to reach

Smoking kept falling throughout the decade. With fewer smokers, the same campaign reaches fewer people, and those who still smoke may find quitting harder. Our UK smoking statistics show how far prevalence has dropped since 2011.

3. How people quit changed

The campaign moved from pushing sign-ups toward general participation. The 2016 evaluation found a trend of smokers taking part without formally signing up. By 2017, e-cigarettes were the most commonly reported stop smoking support among participants. That makes the campaign’s reach harder to count, even if the behavior it encourages is still happening.

Seasonal campaigns elsewhere follow a similar pattern. The Netherlands has run its own Stoptober since 2014, with more than 50,000 participants a year. In one Dutch study, 71.8% of participants who answered a three-month follow-up survey said they had quit, though only 1,127 of 6,856 original respondents replied, so that figure likely overstates success. The US equivalent is the Great American Smokeout, which asks for one smoke-free day rather than 28.

What the Data Means for Your Attempt

Population studies cannot tell you whether you personally will succeed. They do suggest a few practical lessons for anyone planning to quit this October.

• A shared start date helps. The 2012 evaluation credits much of the effect to smokers quitting together, at the same moment. There is a reason October is a good month to try.
• Aim for 28 days, then keep going. The first four weeks are the hardest. Treat day 28 as a checkpoint, not a finish line.
• Use support, not just willpower. Stoptober was built around support tools, and your local NHS service can add stop smoking medicines and advice. Our guide to NHS stop smoking services explains how to get it.
• Expect a slip, and plan for it. The researchers assumed most attempts would not last. A slip in week two is common and is not a reason to give up the whole month.

An app can make the 28 days more concrete. iQuit tracks your smoke-free streak day by day, uses streak shields and slip recovery so one bad moment does not wipe out your progress, and offers SOS craving support for the hardest minutes. Our round-up of the best app for Stoptober compares the options on Android.

Methodology and Sources

All figures in this article come from sources we opened on 15 September 2026.

• Brown et al. (2014): evaluation of Stoptober 2012 using monthly Smoking Toolkit Study data from 2007 to 2012.
• Kuipers et al. (2020): quasi-experimental study of Stoptober 2012 to 2017, also using the Smoking Toolkit Study.
• Public Health England evaluations, 2016 to 2020: the government’s own campaign reports, based on online tracking surveys of about 700 current and recent ex-smokers and on modeling.
• GOV.UK press releases, 2012 to 2023: participation counts and campaign messages.
• Troelstra et al. (2019): a survey of Dutch Stoptober participants.

Quit attempts in these studies are self-reported. The campaign evaluations measure whether people say they tried to quit because of Stoptober. They do not confirm long-term abstinence.

Stoptober Statistics FAQ