Teen Smoking Just Hit The Lowest Rate In American History And It's Not Even Close

The United States Food and Drug Administration's 2025 National Youth Tobacco Survey, released in the summer of 2026, found that cigarette smoking among American youth ages 11 to 18 has fallen to 1.4 percent, the lowest rate ever recorded in the survey's history and a figure that is almost incomprehensibly distant from where the country started. In 1997, when youth smoking rates in the United States were at their highest ever recorded, 36 percent of high school students reported currently smoking, and 70 percent reported having tried smoking at least once. The survey has tracked smoking and other nicotine product use among young Americans annually since 1999, and the trajectory across those 26 years represents one of the most significant public health achievements of the modern era. The use of nicotine vapes or e-cigarettes also fell to 5.2 percent in 2025, the lowest rate since the products peaked in popularity in 2019 following several years of rapid increase that alarmed public health researchers who had just celebrated the collapse in cigarette use. Nicotine pouches, which sit between the lip and gum and are available in various flavors, have stabilized at 1.7 percent after rising over the previous five years, a figure that researchers describe as relatively low and stable rather than a growing cause for concern.

The researchers behind the analysis, from the University of Michigan and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, note that the United States compares favorably to peer countries on youth tobacco and nicotine use, with Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands all showing relatively higher rates of youth vaping in the most recent comparable data from the World Health Organization. Much of the American decline is attributed to decades of sustained public health policy, including advertising restrictions, warning labels, price increases through taxation, restrictions on sales to minors, and public education campaigns that changed the social meaning of smoking among young people from cool to harmful. The researchers emphasize that the numbers are genuinely cause for optimism rather than complacency: adult smoking in the United States has remained more stable than youth rates and continues to be a significant source of preventable disease and death, and there is no guarantee that youth trends will hold steady given the rise of influencers who promote nicotine as a health product. But the number that matters most for the long-term trajectory of smoking-related illness in America is the youth smoking rate, and that number, at 1.4 percent, is the best it has ever been.

Source:https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/us-teens-smoking-rates-historic-low