Youth Vaping Statistics 2026: Teen Use and Quit Data

Teen vaping made headlines as an epidemic in 2019, and parents searching youth vaping statistics 2026 often expect that peak to still be current. It isn’t. Here is what the most recent official youth surveys in the US and Great Britain actually show, with every figure traced to its real survey year.

Key figures at a glance

US middle and high school use (NYTS 2025)

The most current published US data comes from the 2025 National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS), a nationally representative sample of 23,630 students in grades 6-12, with results published in peer-reviewed journals in 2026. Among middle and high schoolers, 7.2% — an estimated 2.01 million students — reported current (past-30-day) use of any tobacco product. E-cigarettes remained the most-used product at 5.2%, ahead of combusted tobacco (2.6%) and nicotine pouches (1.7%) — the cigarette side of that picture, including adult and teen smoking together, is covered in our teen smoking statistics guide.

Nicotine pouches are the one product category moving the wrong way: use doubled from 0.8% of students in 2021 to 1.7% in 2025, making pouches the second most-used tobacco product after e-cigarettes. Among students who do currently use e-cigarettes, 41.2% reported frequent use (on 20 or more of the past 30 days) — meaning a meaningful share of the current-use figure represents habitual, not experimental, use. Among current pouch users, 26.3% reported frequent use.

The trend since the 2019 peak

2019 really was the peak — but not for the reason many parents remember it. A peer-reviewed analysis of NYTS data from 2014 to 2023 found that past-30-day use of any nicotine product among US high schoolers fell from 24.5% in 2014 to 19.6% in 2017, then rose sharply to 31.4% in 2019 — a spike the researchers attribute specifically to the rise of e-cigarettes — before falling all the way to 12.5% by 2023, the lowest level in the whole 2014-2023 series. The 2025 NYTS data confirms the decline has continued: any-tobacco use fell at an average annual rate of 14.5% a year, and e-cigarette use specifically fell 18.1% a year, between 2022 and 2025.

That is the headline good news, but it comes with a genuine caveat. Among the smaller group of students who do currently vape, daily use has become more common over time, not less: daily vaping intensity among current e-cigarette users rose from 9.4% in 2014 to 35.4% in 2025. In other words, fewer teens vape today than in 2019, but a larger share of the ones who do vape are doing so every day rather than occasionally.

Flavors and devices used

Disposable devices remain the dominant device type among current teen e-cigarette users: 66.3% of students who currently vape reported using disposables in the 2025 NYTS — the same device category behind the UK’s own crackdown, covered in our UK disposable vape ban guide. Flavored products are the norm rather than the exception among youth users of both e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches, and dual or poly use — using more than one nicotine product at once — is common among students who use either product, according to the same 2025 survey analysis.

Great Britain youth figures

The ASH Smokefree GB Youth Survey, fielded by YouGov in March-April 2026 among 2,926 11-17 year-olds, found that 19% have ever tried vaping (an estimated 1.1 million), a level that has held steady since 2023 (between 18% and 20%). Current use sits at 6% (about 370,000), similar to 7% the year before — for the adult side of that same survey program, see our UK vaping statistics guide. Only 2% vape daily (about 140,000), and 4% vape more than once a week (about 200,000) — up from just 1% in 2021, though that figure too has now plateaued.

Prevalence rises sharply with age: among 11-15 year-olds, 13% have ever vaped and 4% currently vape, compared with 32% ever-vaped and 13% current use among 16-17 year-olds. Vaping is also closely tied to smoking status: 52% of 11-17 year-olds who currently smoke also vape, versus 19% of those who have quit smoking, and just 9% of teens who have never smoked have ever tried vaping (with only 1% currently doing so). GB youth smoking itself moved in a worrying direction before correcting: ever-smoking rose from 14% in 2023 to 21% in 2025, then fell back to 18% in 2026, while current smoking sits at 4.8% (about 1 in 20).

One more GB figure is worth pairing with the prevalence numbers: 62% of young people in the 2026 survey inaccurately believe vaping is as harmful as, or more harmful than, smoking — a misconception that, if anything, should reduce experimentation among risk-averse teens rather than encourage it, which may partly explain why prevalence has plateaued rather than kept climbing.

Frequency of use vs any use

“Any use” (ever tried, even once) and “current use” (used in the past 30 days) are different numbers, and mixing them up is the single most common way youth vaping statistics get misquoted. In Great Britain, 19% of 11-17 year-olds have ever tried vaping, but only 6% currently do — meaning most GB teens who have ever tried a vape are not regular users of one. In the US, the 2025 NYTS reports current (past-30-day) use only in its headline figures (5.2% e-cigarettes), and frequent use (20-plus days a month) sits well below that again at 41.2% of current users, not 41.2% of all students. Reading past the topline number to see which of these three measures is being cited is essential before comparing any two youth-vaping statistics against each other.

What drives uptake

The data above points to a small number of consistent drivers rather than a single cause. Flavored products are the norm among both US and GB youth users, disposable devices remain the easiest and cheapest entry point, and existing smoking status is one of the strongest predictors of vaping in both countries — teens who already smoke are far more likely to also vape than teens who have never smoked. Widespread inaccurate beliefs about relative harm cut both ways: some teens who wrongly think vaping is just as dangerous as smoking may be deterred, while others who wrongly think it is much safer may not be — for the actual evidence on relative risk, see our is vaping worse than smoking guide and our broader vaping statistics 2026 roundup.

What parents can do

Both the US and GB data point to a similar practical takeaway: current, frequent vaping is concentrated among older teens and among teens who already smoke, not spread evenly across all young people. That means the highest-value conversations are with older teens specifically, and with any teen who has already started smoking or vaping in any form, rather than treating every teenager as equally at risk. Direct, non-judgmental conversations about why a teen is vaping — stress, social pressure, curiosity, or nicotine dependence that has already set in — tend to be more useful than a single warning about health risks, especially given how many teens already hold exaggerated harm beliefs that a scare-based approach will not correct. For a full walkthrough of starting that conversation and what to do if a teen is already vaping regularly, see our guide on helping your teenager quit vaping.

Methodology

US figures come from the 2025 National Youth Tobacco Survey, a CDC/FDA-sponsored survey of students in grades 6-12, with results published in 2026 in the journals Pediatrics and Nicotine & Tobacco Research (accessed via their PubMed/Europe PMC records, since cdc.gov and fda.gov block automated fetches); the historical 2014-2023 trend comes from a separate peer-reviewed analysis of the same underlying NYTS dataset, published in Addiction. Great Britain figures come from ASH’s Smokefree GB Youth Survey, conducted by YouGov each spring since 2013, with the 2026 wave fielded in March-April 2026 among 2,926 11-17 year-olds. This article could not verify a directly comparable, currently accessible Australian youth-specific vaping breakdown at the time of writing (the relevant government and AIHW pages were not reachable), so no Australian youth figure is included here rather than substituting an adult-population number. Every figure above is labeled with its real survey year and fieldwork date; none is presented as a same-year 2026 count unless the underlying survey genuinely ran in 2026.

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