Smoking Statistics Australia 2026: Rates and Quit Data

Australia has some of the lowest smoking rates in the developed world, the product of decades of plain packaging, tax rises, and advertising bans. If you’re searching for smoking statistics Australia 2026, here is the most current official data: how many Australians smoke, how that compares by age and sex, what’s happening with vaping, and how First Nations smoking rates are changing.

Key figures at a glance

Adult smoking prevalence and the trend

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ National Health Survey 2022 (released December 2023), 10.6% of Australian adults aged 18 and over were current daily smokers — described by the ABS as “one in ten.” That rate has fallen steadily for decades: from 23.8% in 1995, to 22.4% in 2001, to 10.6% in 2022. Nearly three in five adults (58.3%) have never smoked at all. The ABS also states plainly that smoking remains one of the largest preventable causes of death and disease in the country, estimated to kill almost 20,500 Australians a year — about 13% of all deaths — and responsible for 8.6% of the country’s total burden of disease in 2018 — the same combination of cancer and lung disease covered in depth in our lung cancer statistics and COPD statistics guides.

Australia’s decline in smoking rates has tracked a long run of tobacco-control policy since 1973: tobacco taxation, advertising restrictions, smoke-free laws in more and more public places, mandated warnings on packaging, and mass-media campaigns. The ABS explicitly links this policy mix to the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which Australia signed in 2003.

What makes the Australian trend notable internationally is how consistent the decline has been across three separate survey waves spanning more than two decades — 1995, 2001, and 2022 — rather than a single good year skewing the picture. A daily-smoking rate cut by more than half since 2001 puts Australia among the lower end of high-income countries by this specific measure, though the ABS release itself does not provide a year-by-year mortality trend to go alongside the prevalence numbers, so this article reports prevalence trends only rather than inferring a parallel death-rate trend the ABS has not published.

By age and by sex

Men are still more likely to smoke daily than women: 12.6% of men versus 8.7% of women in 2022. The gap holds up across most age groups. Daily smoking is lowest among the youngest adults — 7.3% of 18-24 year-olds overall (9.3% of young men, 5.9% of young women) — and rises with age to peak in the 55-64 bracket, where 14.9% smoke daily (17.4% of men, 12.0% of women), before falling again in the oldest age groups.

Vaping prevalence and the reforms

Vaping has grown quickly in Australia even as smoking has kept falling. The ABS found that 14.4% of adults had used an e-cigarette or vaping device at least once in their life, while 4.0% reported currently using one. Men were more likely than women both to have ever vaped (17.4% versus 11.4%) and to currently vape (5.2% versus 2.9%). Current use skews heavily toward younger adults: 6.7% of 18-44 year-olds currently vape, compared with just 1.6% of adults 45 and over.

These 2022 figures predate Australia’s more recent regulatory tightening of vaping products, which moved e-cigarettes toward a prescription-based model and restricted retail sales — changes that arrived after this survey wave; see our prescription vape vs NRT comparison for how that framework works in practice. Because the ABS has not yet published a newer national vaping prevalence release at time of writing, this article does not claim to know how those specific reforms have moved the 2022 numbers; a future ABS or AIHW release would be needed to say that with data rather than assumption.

The age skew in current vaping use is worth sitting with alongside the age skew in smoking. Daily smoking peaks among people in their 50s and 60s, a pattern consistent with decades-old habits formed when smoking was far more common and less regulated. Current vaping runs the opposite way, concentrated in adults under 45. Read together, the two datasets describe two different nicotine-use generations rather than one simply replacing the other outright.

A real quit story from the Australian Government’s own health department.

Cigarette prices and excise

Australia is widely recognised as having some of the highest legal cigarette prices in the world, driven by a tobacco excise that the federal government has raised repeatedly over the past decade specifically to discourage smoking. This article does not quote a specific per-pack price here, because prices change with each federal excise adjustment and are covered, with current figures, in our dedicated guides on how much a pack of cigarettes costs and cigarette tax by country, which track pricing and tax share specifically rather than as a side note to prevalence data.

The Indigenous health gap

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians smoke at meaningfully higher rates than the national average, though the gap is narrowing. The ABS’s National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Survey 2022-23 found that 29% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged 15 and over smoked daily (excluding e-cigarettes and vaping devices), down from 37% in 2018-19. Over the same period, the share who were ex-smokers rose from 22% to 26%, meaning a large part of the improvement reflects existing smokers successfully quitting, not just fewer people starting.

That 29% is still close to three times the general adult daily-smoking rate of 10.6%, which is why Indigenous-specific quit support — culturally appropriate programs, community health services, and targeted campaigns — remains a distinct priority in Australian tobacco control rather than an assumption that national-level programs alone will close the gap.

The pace of the recent improvement is itself notable: an eight-percentage-point drop in daily smoking in just four years (2018-19 to 2022-23) is a large move for any single survey wave, and the ABS’s own data shows the improvement is coming from both directions at once — fewer people currently smoking and more former smokers — rather than from one factor alone.

Quit attempts and success

The clearest quitting signal in the data is the rise in ex-smokers relative to current smokers over time: as daily smoking has fallen from 22.4% (2001) to 10.6% (2022) nationally, and from 37% to 29% among First Nations Australians in just four years, that shift comes overwhelmingly from existing smokers quitting and from fewer young people taking it up, rather than from smokers dying at a faster rate than usual. The ABS does not publish a single national “quit success rate” figure in the survey release itself, so this article reports the prevalence and ex-smoker trends above rather than inventing a headline success percentage the ABS does not state.

What the numbers cannot show is how many attempts each of those successful quitters needed before it stuck. Quitting is rarely a single clean attempt for anyone, in any country, and Australia’s low current smoking rate reflects a population where trying, relapsing, and trying again eventually adds up to the national average moving down — not a country where quitting has become effortless.

Methodology

All national figures in this article come from the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ National Health Survey 2022, released 15 December 2023 — the ABS’s main household health survey, run periodically (this release replaced the previous one covering the 2020-21 financial year). First Nations figures come from the ABS’s National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Survey, 2022-23 financial year. Neither survey has a newer public wave at the time of writing, and the National Drug Strategy Household Survey (run by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare) — another major Australian source for smoking data — could not be accessed directly while researching this piece; where its figures might differ slightly from the ABS numbers here, that reflects the two surveys’ different methodologies rather than a factual error in either one. No source publishes a genuine 2026 count; the label on every figure above is the real survey year.

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