Smoking During Pregnancy Statistics 2026: Rates and Quitting

Every official count of smoking during pregnancy tells the same story from a slightly different angle: fewer women are smoking while expecting a baby than a decade ago, but the numbers vary a lot depending on which country, which data source, and which year you’re looking at. If you’re pregnant, planning a pregnancy, or supporting someone who is, the statistics below are pulled from the actual government and research publications behind the headlines — with the real year each figure comes from, because most official series lag a year or two behind today.

Key figures at a glance

These are the most recent official figures available at the time of writing, each from a named government or research source. Read the “latest year” column carefully — national statistics on maternal smoking are compiled slowly, so a figure labelled 2026 in a marketing article, without a real citation, should not be trusted.

The two U.S. rows above are not the same measurement disagreeing with itself — they come from two different methods (see the methodology section), which is a useful reminder that “the smoking-in-pregnancy rate” is not one single number even inside one country.

United States: two different data sources

The CDC and the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) track maternal smoking through birth certificates, which every U.S. state records at the national level through the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS). The most recent published comparison shows the percentage of women who smoked cigarettes at any time during pregnancy declined from 7.2% in 2016 to 3.7% in 2022 (CDC/NCHS QuickStats, MMWR, December 2023). The decline held across every racial and ethnic group reported, though starting points varied widely: rates fell from 16.7% to 11.0% among non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native women, from 10.5% to 5.4% among non-Hispanic White women, from 6.0% to 3.1% among non-Hispanic Black women, from 4.5% to 2.1% among non-Hispanic Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander women, from 1.8% to 1.0% among Hispanic women, and from 0.6% to 0.3% among non-Hispanic Asian women.

A separate CDC data source, the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS), asks women directly rather than relying on what’s recorded on a birth certificate. Its most recent published analysis, covering 37 U.S. jurisdictions in 2021, found 5.4% of women reported smoking during pregnancy, against 12.1% who reported smoking in the three months before becoming pregnant — meaning a substantial share stopped once they knew. The same report found 7.2% reported smoking again during the postpartum period, a pattern covered in more detail below.

England: smoking at time of delivery

England measures something slightly different again: Smoking Status at Time of Delivery (SATOD), recorded by maternity services and published by NHS England. According to the NHS England SATOD data series distributed through the government’s OHID open-data platform, the rate has fallen from 13.6% of mothers in 2010/11 to 6.1% in the most recent reporting year, 2024/25 — a steady decline of roughly one percentage point every two years, with a slightly sharper drop from 7.4% the year before. England’s Tobacco Control Plan set a national ambition to bring the rate to 6% or below by the end of 2022; on this data series, that target was still being approached three financial years later, reached only in 2024/25.

The original NHS England SATOD publication page on digital.nhs.uk blocked our automated request this session, so the figures above are drawn directly from the same underlying NHS England dataset republished through the OHID Fingertips public indicators platform (indicator 93085) — a primary government data source, not a secondary summary.

Australia, Canada and Ireland: what the data shows

Australia’s national reporting on this comes from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s “Mothers and Babies” series, and Canada’s from Statistics Canada and the Canadian Perinatal Surveillance System. Both organisations blocked our automated access attempts this session (a Cloudflare bot check on the Australian side, and a JavaScript-rendered data table on the Canadian side), so no country-level percentage for either is stated here — a placeholder guess would be worse than an honest gap. If you need the current Australian or Canadian figure, both agencies publish it directly on their own sites under “Mothers and babies” and “tobacco use statistics” respectively.

Ireland has no dedicated national smoking-in-pregnancy dataset that turned up in this search either, which is itself a useful data point: several English-speaking countries with strong general tobacco surveillance still don’t publish a routine, easy-to-find maternal smoking rate the way the U.S. and England do. For general national smoking trends in two of those countries, see Australia’s smoking statistics and Ireland’s smoking statistics, which cover the overall adult population rather than pregnancy specifically.

The short NHS Smokefree video above covers the same ground the statistics do: quitting during pregnancy is common, achievable, and supported at every stage.

How many women quit, and how many relapse after birth

The 2021 PRAMS data gives one of the few solid, sourced answers to “how many pregnant smokers actually quit”: among U.S. women who smoked in the three months before pregnancy, 56.1% reported quitting smoking while pregnant. That is not a small number — it means most people in this position do stop, usually once they confirm the pregnancy. The harder number sits on the other side of delivery: the same report found 7.2% of women reported smoking again during the postpartum period, higher than the 5.4% who reported smoking during pregnancy itself. Relapse after birth is common enough that it shows up clearly in national survey data, not just anecdotally.

On what actually helps someone stay quit, the most recent update to the Cochrane review of psychosocial interventions in pregnancy — search date November 2025, covering 127 trials and 47,361 participants — found that counseling, financial incentive programs, and structured health education each increase the likelihood of not smoking in late pregnancy compared with usual care, with counseling estimated at roughly one-and-a-half times the quit likelihood (relative risk 1.51) and financial incentive programs estimated even higher (relative risk 2.03). These are relative effects on top of whatever a person’s baseline chance of quitting already is, not standalone guarantees, and the same review found these interventions were also linked to a lower likelihood of babies being born with low birthweight.

None of this is about willpower alone. A midwife or stop-smoking adviser who asks about smoking and offers a concrete plan or incentive is, per this evidence, meaningfully more likely to help someone stay quit through to delivery than being left to do it alone — which is exactly why the PRAMS report also tracked how often providers even raise the subject: 73.7% of women were asked about smoking before pregnancy, rising to 93.7% during prenatal care, and dropping back to 57.3% at the postpartum checkup — the exact point where relapse risk is highest and the conversation happens least.

If you’re navigating this after a newborn has arrived, quitting smoking with a newborn in the house covers the specific pressures of that period in more depth, and if pregnancy itself is still ahead of you, the risks of smoking during pregnancy and how to quit and safe ways to quit while pregnant go through the practical options trimester by trimester.

Vaping and NRT in pregnancy: what the guidance says

Because this is a common and sensitive question, it’s worth quoting the guidance exactly rather than paraphrasing it. The NHS states: “You can use nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) during pregnancy if it will help you stop smoking and you’re unable to stop without it,” adding that “NRT contains only nicotine and none of the damaging chemicals found in cigarettes, so it is a much better option than continuing to smoke.” Its guidance is explicit that this decision isn’t one to make alone: “Before using any of these products, speak to a midwife, GP, a pharmacist or a specialist stop smoking adviser” (NHS, “Stop smoking in pregnancy”).

On vaping, the same NHS page says: “If using an e-cigarette helps you to stop smoking, it is much safer for you and your baby than continuing to smoke,” while also being candid that “e-cigarettes are fairly new and there are still some things we do not know,” concluding that “current evidence on e-cigarettes indicates they are much less risky than smoking.” None of this is dosing advice, and none of it says NRT or vaping is risk-free — it says both are a better option than continuing to smoke, and both decisions belong in a conversation with a midwife or doctor, not a general article. On the U.S. side, the government’s own cessation resource is similarly direct that timing isn’t a barrier: “Quitting at any time during your pregnancy is one of the best things you can do for your baby’s health” (smokefree.gov).

If you’re breastfeeding and weighing NRT specifically, using nicotine patches and gum while breastfeeding goes through that guidance in more detail — again, talk to a midwife or doctor before deciding, since the right answer depends on your own situation.

What the numbers mean if you’re pregnant and smoking

None of the statistics above are a scorecard, and they’re not meant to be read as blame. What they show, taken together, is that quitting during pregnancy is genuinely common — most people who smoked before pregnancy do stop once they find out, per the PRAMS data — and that the support that measurably helps (a direct conversation with a midwife, a structured program, sometimes a financial incentive) works better than trying to do it silently. If you’re currently smoking and pregnant, the single most useful next step, according to every source above, is the same one: tell your midwife, GP, or a stop-smoking service, and let them help you build a plan, rather than trying to quit — or hide that you haven’t — on your own.

Outside of a clinical plan, some people also find it useful to have a private, judgment-free way to see their own progress: iQuit’s health-milestone tracker and money-saved dashboard were built for exactly that kind of day-to-day tracking, alongside whatever support your midwife or stop-smoking service is providing — not as a replacement for it, and not as a source of medical advice about pregnancy.

Methodology and data years

Every figure in this article carries a specific data year because that’s how this kind of national statistic actually works: it is collected, checked, and published on a delay, typically one to two years behind the year it describes. The U.S. NVSS birth-certificate figure (3.7%) is for 2022, published in a QuickStats update in December 2023. The separate U.S. PRAMS survey figure (5.4%) is for 2021. England’s SATOD figure (6.1%) is for the financial year 2024/25, the most recent one in the published series at the time of writing, with the underlying dataset last updated in November 2025. None of these is “2026 data” — no national maternal-smoking series had published a 2026 figure at the time of writing, and any article claiming one should be read with suspicion.

The NVSS and PRAMS figures for the United States also aren’t measuring quite the same thing: NVSS draws on what’s recorded on the birth certificate at delivery, checked against medical records, while PRAMS is a self-reported survey conducted after birth. That methodological difference, not a sudden change in behaviour, is the most likely reason the two U.S. figures (3.7% vs. 5.4%) don’t match — a pattern worth remembering any time two “official” statistics on the same topic disagree.

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