What smoking takes
How many years does smoking take off your life?
About ten, for someone who smokes through adult life and never stops. The useful part is what that figure is and is not.
Written by Lee H. Last reviewed 24 August 2026.
The short answer
Roughly ten years of life expectancy, on average, for a lifetime smoker compared with somebody who never smoked.
Two large bodies of work land in the same place. Jha et al., "21st-Century Hazards of Smoking and Benefits of Cessation in the United States," New England Journal of Medicine, 2013, put it at about a decade in a contemporary US population. Doll et al.'s British Doctors Study, BMJ 2004, which followed British doctors for fifty years, found about ten years as well. Two different countries, two different generations, the same answer.
What the figure means
It is the gap between two population averages, and the spread inside each of those populations is enormous. Some lifetime smokers live into their nineties. Some people who never smoked do not. An average of ten years describes a crowd.
It is also not a straight multiplication of cigarettes. The current per-cigarette estimate is about 20 minutes, 17 for men and 22 for women, from Jackson, Jarvis and West in Addiction, 2025. That figure is genuinely useful for picturing a day or a month. It falls apart if you multiply it out over a lifetime, which is why the calculator on this site caps the loss.
And it depends on how much and how long. Ten years is the figure for smoking throughout adult life. Somebody who smoked for eight years in their twenties and stopped is not carrying that number, which is the whole point of the next section.
The number that matters more
The years smoking has already cost cannot be changed. It is a fact about the past and there is nothing to be done with it except feel bad, which helps nobody.
The number worth knowing is the other one: how much of it comes back if you stop. That has published figures behind it too.
| Age at quitting | Years gained (roughly) |
|---|---|
| 25 to 34 | 10 |
| 35 to 44 | 9 |
| 45 to 54 | 6 |
| 55 to 64 | 4 |
Same study, other direction. A person in the youngest band recovers close to the whole ten years. Somebody in the oldest band studied still recovers about four. That is the half of this question that is still in your hands, and it is the half this whole site is built around.
Work out your own two numbers
The quit smoking calculator gives you both at once, from four answers: your age, your sex, how much you smoke and how long you have smoked. What it has likely cost, and what quitting today could win back. It runs in your browser, asks for no account, and nothing you type is sent anywhere. Every figure behind it, and where each one comes from, is on the methodology page.
This page reports a motivational estimate built from population averages. It is not a prediction about any one person, it does not diagnose, treat or prevent any condition, and it is not medical advice. No guarantee is made or offered about the accuracy of any figure or calculation on this site. Talk to a doctor or a quitline about stopping smoking. In the US, that is 1-800-QUIT-NOW.
Keep reading
Where to go next
How many years do you get back?
The four published bands, and why recovery follows a curve.
Is it too late to quit?
No, and the numbers say why. Less later, never nothing.
What one cigarette costs
About 20 minutes, and why that cannot be multiplied forever.
Sources
- Jha, P. et al., "21st-Century Hazards of Smoking and Benefits of Cessation in the United States," New England Journal of Medicine, 2013.
- Doll, R., Peto, R., Boreham, J. and Sutherland, I., "Mortality in relation to smoking: 50 years' observations on male British doctors," BMJ, 2004.
- Jackson, S. E., Jarvis, M. J. and West, R., "The price of a cigarette: 20 minutes of life?", Addiction, 2025.
See the full model on the methodology page, or go back to all guides.