The money
How much do I spend on cigarettes a year?
Fifteen a day at ten dollars a pack is $2,739 a year. Here is the whole table, so you can read off your own.
Written by Lee H. Last reviewed 30 August 2026.
Most people underestimate this, and not by a little. The reason is that cigarettes are bought in small amounts, often, which is exactly the shape of spending the human brain is worst at totalling. Nobody would sign a $3,652 annual contract without noticing. Almost everybody spends it a pack at a time without noticing.
What a year costs, by habit and price
Twenty to a pack. Find your row, then your column.
| A day | $8 a pack | $10 a pack | $12 a pack | $15 a pack |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | $730 | $913 | $1,096 | $1,370 |
| 10 | $1,461 | $1,826 | $2,191 | $2,739 |
| 15 | $2,191 | $2,739 | $3,287 | $4,109 |
| 20 | $2,922 | $3,652 | $4,383 | $5,479 |
| 25 | $3,652 | $4,566 | $5,479 | $6,848 |
| 30 | $4,383 | $5,479 | $6,574 | $8,218 |
If your pack is not twenty, or your currency is not dollars, the shape still holds and the numbers do not. Put your own figures into the cost of smoking calculator to get your exact figure.
The same habit, over longer
Fifteen a day at ten dollars a pack, which is roughly the middle of the table above:
| Over | Spent |
|---|---|
| A day | $7.50 |
| A week | $52.50 |
| A month | $228 |
| A year | $2,739 |
| Five years | $13,697 |
| Ten years | $27,393 |
| Twenty years | $54,786 |
Those are undiscounted totals of money that changed hands. They are deliberately not dressed up as what the same money would have become in an index fund, because that turns a fact you can check into a projection you cannot, and the fact is large enough already.
Nobody would sign a $3,652 annual contract without noticing. Almost everybody spends it a pack at a time.
The sum, so you can check it
One line, and no rounding tricks:
cigarettes a day, times 365.2425, divided by cigarettes per pack, times the price of a pack.
The 365.2425 is the average length of a year in the Gregorian calendar, leap years included. Using a flat 365 would quietly undercount by about a quarter of a day's spending a year, which is small, and this site uses the same constant everywhere so that the money figure and the time figure can never be built on two different years.
The other bill, from the same cigarettes
Money is the easy half. The same count of cigarettes also has a time cost, and this site derives both from the identical number so they can never disagree with each other.
The measured rate is about 17 minutes of life per cigarette for men and 22 for women (Jackson et al., 2025). At 15 a day, one year of smoking is 5,479 cigarettes, which is about 65 days of life expectancy for a man and about 84 days for a woman. Ten years at that rate is roughly 1.8 years and 2.3 years.
How much of that comes back if you stop depends on how old you are when you do, and that is a separate question with its own page: how many years do you get back.
Two things people get wrong when they work this out
- Counting the cheap packs. If some of your cigarettes come from duty free, a carton deal or a cheaper brand, the number to use is what you actually pay on average. The best price is the one people remember and it produces a total that is comfortably wrong.
- Forgetting the drift. Tobacco prices rise faster than general inflation in most countries, because that is deliberate policy. A ten year total worked out at today's price is a floor.
The time figures on this page are a motivational estimate built from population averages. They are not a prediction about you, they do not diagnose, treat or prevent any condition, and this 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
Cost of smoking calculator
Your own price, your own pack size, money and time side by side.
What do 500 cigarettes cost?
The same question at carton scale, in money and in minutes.
The cost of smoking in Australia
What the numbers look like in the most expensive market in the world.
The bill nobody counts
Smokers are rated at two to three times the premium. Over one term that is a second invoice this page never sees.
Sources
- Jackson, S. E., Jarvis, M. J. and West, R., "The price of a cigarette: 20 minutes of life?", Addiction, 2025.
- Pack prices in the table are illustrative round figures. Use your own.