US Smoking Rate Hits Record Low as Federal Tobacco Office Closes

Just under 9% of American adults smoked cigarettes last year, the lowest share the federal government has ever recorded and a steep fall from the 42% who lit up in the mid-1960s. The estimate comes from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey of more than 24,200 adults, which means roughly one in eleven adults now counts as a current smoker.

The milestone arrived weeks after the federal office that spent six decades pushing that number down was shut. In an April 2025 reorganization of US health agencies, the Trump administration eliminated the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, the unit behind the national surveillance and the advertising that helped produce the very record now being celebrated.

America’s Smoking Rate Falls to One in Eleven Adults

The CDC counts someone as a current smoker if they have smoked at least 100 cigarettes in their life and now smoke every day or some days. By that measure, the preliminary survey data put the adult rate at 9% for last year, down from a reading that first slipped below 10% in 2024. It is the latest step in a slide that has run, with only brief pauses, for two generations.

Yolonda Richardson, president and chief executive of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, a Washington advocacy and research group, called the trend a turning point worth marking. The continued decline, she said, is a public health achievement that has saved millions of lives and billions of dollars in health care costs. Cigarette smoking remains a risk factor for lung cancer, heart disease and stroke, and it is still treated by health officials as the leading cause of preventable death in the country.

The drop did not happen on its own. Cigarette taxes, repeated price hikes, indoor smoking bans, public education and a hard cultural shift away from lighting up in public all bent the curve down over decades. The scale of that change is easier to see when the numbers are lined up.

The Federal Office That Drove the Decline Closed This Spring

The reorganization that swept through the Department of Health and Human Services this spring folded or cut entire CDC units, and the Office on Smoking and Health was among the casualties. The shake-up, carried out under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and tied to a White House order calling for large-scale staff reductions, hit teams working on chronic disease, injury prevention and tobacco control.

That office did the unglamorous work behind the headline. It tracked who was smoking and who was quitting, supported the state quitlines that field calls from people trying to stop, and gathered the national data on youth tobacco use that regulators rely on. Pull the office out, and the country loses both the scoreboard and one of the players.

Former staff and outside groups warned that the timing could not be worse, with one ex-director of the office describing the closure as a gift to the tobacco industry. Richardson argued that progress on prevention was being set back just as the payoff was arriving, and pressed for the funding and programs to be rebuilt.

This critical work must be restored and sustained to continue reducing smoking-related disease, death and healthcare costs nationwide.

That was Richardson, speaking after the survey data landed. The American Lung Association reached a similar conclusion in its annual report on federal tobacco prevention funding, warning that the cuts put lives at risk by hollowing out the programs that help people quit.

What the ‘Tips’ Campaign Bought for $7.3 Billion

The most visible thing the office ran was “Tips From Former Smokers,” the blunt television campaign that launched in 2012 and put real ex-smokers, scarred by cancer and chronic illness, on screen with a single number to call: 1-800-QUIT-NOW. After 13 years on air, the ads are slated to go dark at the end of September as the contract behind them lapses. The CDC’s own accounting of the Tips campaign results over its first six years helps explain why public health groups are alarmed.

• $7.3 billion in smoking-related health care costs estimated saved during 2012 to 2018.
• More than 1 million Americans who successfully quit because of the ads.
• 16.4 million smokers prompted to attempt quitting over the same stretch.
• 129,000 early deaths estimated prevented.

What replaces that megaphone is the open question. State quitlines, already stretched, have started trimming services, in some cases cutting counseling to a single call and dropping free cessation medication. Fewer ads mean fewer calls, and fewer calls mean some people who might have quit will keep smoking, which is exactly the dynamic the campaign was built to break.

Where Nicotine Use Is Migrating Now

Cigarettes are fading, but nicotine is not. Adult e-cigarette use sat at about 7% last year and held roughly steady through 2025, after years of inching upward. Among teenagers the picture actually improved, with current youth vaping falling to its lowest level in more than a decade, down to 5.9% in the most recent youth survey from a peak that topped a quarter of high schoolers in 2019.

The bigger growth story is in pouches. In January 2025 the Food and Drug Administration cleared 20 Zyn nicotine pouch products for sale, the first authorization of its kind, on the logic that the pouches could help adult smokers move off cigarettes. Sales have surged since. The nicotine market a smoker faces today looks very different from the one the old campaigns were designed for:

• Combustible cigarettes, still the deadliest format and now used by 9% of adults.
• E-cigarettes and vapes, used by about 7% of adults and dominated by disposable brands.
• Oral nicotine pouches such as Zyn, the fastest-growing category, with US shipments rising sharply.

Federal policy on the combustible end loosened at the same time. The administration formally withdrew the FDA’s long-delayed proposal to ban menthol cigarettes in January 2025, a product that accounts for roughly a third of the US cigarette market and is used heavily by Black smokers. Public health groups had pushed the ban for years as a way to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Who Quit Fastest, and the Smokers Left Behind

A national average of 9% hides how uneven the decline has been. Smoking has dropped fastest among younger and higher-income adults, while rates stay stubbornly higher among people with lower incomes, less education and those in rural areas, the same groups that lean most on the free quitlines now being scaled back. The danger in cutting cessation support is that it widens that gap rather than closing it.

The pouch boom adds a second fault line. Harm-reduction advocates argue that moving a committed smoker to Zyn or a vape lowers their risk, since the worst damage comes from burning tobacco. Critics counter that authorizing flavored products risks creating a new generation of nicotine users while the menthol decision keeps the most addictive cigarettes on shelves.

Underneath all of it sits the hard problem of dependence, which is why behavioral and pharmaceutical tools matter so much for the people still hooked. The hunt for better treatments cuts across addictions, from nicotine to alcohol, where researchers are now testing whether drugs built for other conditions can blunt cravings and heavy use even before regulators formally sign off.

Youth remains the variable that worries officials most. Teen smoking is near historic lows, but the data systems that flagged the vaping spike of the last decade ran through the same office that just closed, leaving the early-warning radar thinner heading into a period of rapid product change.

Why the Next Drop Is No Longer Guaranteed

The country crossed into single digits and kept going, a result that took taxes, bans, lawsuits and one of the most effective public health campaigns ever funded. The unusual part of this milestone is that it is being toasted in the same season the apparatus that delivered it was taken apart.

If the surveillance and the quit campaigns are rebuilt, the 9% reading becomes another waypoint on a long climb down. If they are not, it may be remembered as the year the line stopped falling, and the number to watch will be the first one that ticks back up.