Have you noticed more smoking on screens lately?

Social media feeds are littered with images of celebrities smoking at fashion events, in music videos, at parties and on the cover of Vanity Fair. Just as 1990s fashion has made a comeback, it can feel like cigarettes are having a major cultural resurgence.

But social media posts aren’t a proxy for research and data. The latest National Drug Strategy Household Survey results released today tell a far more important story: smoking rates in Australia are still declining.

In 2025, 5.6% of Australians aged 14 and over smoked daily. This is down from 8.3% in 2022–23. Among adults aged 18 and over, daily smoking fell to 5.8%.

Australia is now very close to achieving its national target of reducing adult daily smoking to 5% or less by 2030.

Current smoking (daily, weekly, or less than weekly) among young adults aged 18–24, an age group highly targeted by tobacco industry marketing, also fell to 6.1% in 2025.

Daily e-cigarette use (vaping) among people aged 14 and over remained stable at 3.6%, rather than continuing the steep increases seen in previous years.

Among young adults aged 18–24, current e-cigarette use (daily, weekly, monthly, or less than monthly) fell from 20.6% in 2022–23 to 14% in 2025.

And there was no compensatory rise in smoking. This is important because critics of Australia’s stronger vape laws had warned restrictions would push young people towards cigarettes. These results don’t support this claim.

Instead, the........

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