Frequently asked questions

We use US national average retail prices per 20-cigarette pack sourced from CDC tobacco surveillance reports, Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index data, and the Orzechowski & Walker Tax Burden on Tobacco annual series — the standard data source used by health economists and policy researchers. These are the all-in retail prices consumers actually paid, including federal and state excise taxes and the MSA surcharge added from 2000.

In November 1998, the four largest US tobacco companies signed the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) with 46 state attorneys general. The companies agreed to pay states approximately $246 billion over 25 years to cover smoking-related healthcare costs — and immediately passed this cost to consumers. Average retail pack prices more than doubled between 1997 ($1.77) and 2001 ($3.91). Federal excise taxes and state-level increases have pushed prices further every decade since.

Yes. The prices used are the final retail prices consumers paid, which include federal excise tax (currently $1.0066/pack), state excise taxes (ranging from $0.17/pack in Missouri to $5.35/pack in Connecticut), local municipal taxes where applicable, and the MSA pass-through costs. All of this is rolled into the historical national average retail prices.

SmokeLoss uses US national average prices. State prices differ significantly: New Yorkers pay $12+ per pack; Missourians typically pay under $6. If you smoked in a high-tax state for most of your life, your actual spend was probably higher than our estimate. Lower-tax states, lower. The national average is the most defensible single number for a tool like this.

The standard US pack contains 20 cigarettes — the legal standard and most common format. All calculations use 20 per pack. Some premium, menthol-free, or specialty packs contain 25 cigarettes; European packs also often contain 20. Cartons contain 10 packs (200 cigarettes).

For each year from your start year through 2024, we invest your annual cigarette spending at the start of the year and apply that year's actual S&P 500 total return (price appreciation plus dividends reinvested). The result compounds. We use real historical annual returns including every bear market — 1974 (−26.5%), 2002 (−22.1%), and 2008 (−37.0%) are all in the data. We don't cherry-pick good years.

Annual investments (not monthly); no capital gains taxes on returns; no fund expense ratios (low-cost index funds charge ~0.03%/year, which is negligible); no inflation adjustment (all values are nominal). The model is intentionally simplified to show the power of compounding — it's illustrative, not a financial plan. Actual after-tax results in a taxable account would be lower; a Roth IRA would preserve the gains tax-free.

For each year, we calculate how many troy ounces of gold your annual cigarette budget would have bought at that year's London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) annual average price. We accumulate total ounces across all years and multiply by the current gold spot price (approximately $3,300/oz as of June 2025). Gold was fixed at $35/oz until 1971, then free-floated — it has been in a strong bull market since 2000 and hit all-time highs above $3,000/oz in 2025.

The math is correct but the scenario is simplified. In practice: you'd pay taxes on investment gains (roughly 15–20% on long-term capital gains in the US); behaviorally, most people don't hold through crashes; and you'd be investing monthly, not annually. That said, the order of magnitude is realistic — compound growth over decades is genuinely powerful, and that's the point the calculator is making.

Research measuring how long smokers take to smoke commercial cigarettes finds an average of approximately 7 minutes per cigarette. We multiply your total lifetime cigarette count by 7 minutes and convert to days. This is actual time with a cigarette in your hand — not time affected by nicotine, which is continuous and much larger in scope.

The average US smoker smokes about 14 cigarettes per day. At the 2024 national average of $8.24/pack (20 cigarettes), that's approximately $2,100 per year or $175 per month. A pack-a-day (20 cigarettes) habit costs about $3,010 per year in 2024. Over 30 years at today's prices, that's roughly $90,000 in direct spend — before considering the investment opportunity cost.

No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser using JavaScript. Nothing you enter is transmitted anywhere. We use Umami for cookieless, privacy-preserving aggregate analytics (page views only — no personal data). See our Privacy Policy for full details.

We're trying to make the math visible. The financial cost of smoking is real but abstract — most smokers have never calculated it. Seeing the actual number, and what it could have compounded to, is useful information. Whether you quit or not is entirely your call. No judgment here, just arithmetic.

I grew up around smoking — my father smoked, both my uncles did. The smell of tobacco was just the default: in the car, on his clothes, everywhere. Nobody calculated what it cost. It was background noise.

Years later I spent a lot of time in and out of pulmonology departments through my work in medical devices. That's where I saw where the background noise ends up — people with lung cancer in their 40s and 50s. For most lung cancers there is still, today, no good treatment. The health argument was already in front of everyone and it wasn't changing behavior. So I tried a different angle.

Health warnings have been running for fifty years. Graphic images on cigarette packs, statistics, public campaigns. The people who were going to quit because of a warning have already quit. Nicotine dependency doesn't respond well to information alone.

The financial cost — the actual lifetime total, expressed as a car, a house down payment, a retirement account — is an argument that hasn't been made as clearly. Maybe it lands differently for some people. Maybe it doesn't. But the health-only approach has had its chance. This is worth a try.

Honestly, I'm not sure. SmokeLoss is not a stop-smoking program — it's a calculator. What it can do is surface the number that the transaction structure actively hides: the total spend, the compound opportunity cost, the equivalent in real things. Whether that number changes anything is up to the person looking at it. But seeing the real math is better than not seeing it.