Who's Actually Vaping in Britain? ONS's 2025 Data, Read Differently

Britain's e-cigarette audience isn't one customer - it's three, and the growth is hiding in the flavors

The UK's statistics office just published its 2025 figures on e-cigarettes, and the headline - roughly 5.4 million users, flat for a second year - sounds calm. Split that number by smoking history, though, and a much more useful picture surfaces. Britain's vape audience is not one person. It's three, and they behave very differently. For anyone selling into the UK, that distinction is the whole game.

Source: Office for National Statistics (ONS), "Adult smoking habits in the UK: 2025," published 6 October 2026 (covering 2025), from the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (Opn), England/Scotland/Wales, adults 16+. Composition shares are 2Firsts' weighted estimates. All figures are survey point estimates; small year-on-year moves are not necessarily statistically significant.

1. Three Audiences, Not One

Here's the trap in the headline. 5.4 million e-cigarette users reads like one stable market. The ONS, though, splits adults by their cigarette history, and the vape audience turns out to be three quite different groups.

The largest is former cigarette smokers - about half of all vapers (~54%, roughly 2.9 million). Only 20.7% of ex-smokers vape, but they sit on a huge base of some 14 million ex-smokers. Second are current cigarette smokers who also vape - the "dual users" (~26%, ~1.4 million). They carry the highest e-cig use rate of any group (33.8%), but from a much smaller base of about 4.2 million smokers. Third, and most surprising, are people who have never been regular smokers (~20%, ~1.05 million). Their individual rate is tiny (2.9%), but they're drawn from the biggest pool of all - some 36.4 million adults - which is why they still add up to a fifth of all vapers.

2. Frequency Is the Second Story

The three groups don't just differ in size - they vape differently. Among ex-smokers who vape, about 81% use every day. Among the dual users, only about half do. The never-regular-smokers sit near 45% daily.

The read matters for product: ex-smokers who make the switch tend to be daily users, while dual users split between daily and occasional. That difference is what capacity and flavor are quietly competing over.

3. A Ten-Year Climb That's Starting to Flatten

Zoom out and the trend is a slow, steady rise. Among current cigarette smokers, the share who also vape climbed from 10.6% in 2014 to 33.8% in 2025 - a 23-point jump. Former smokers' e-cig use rose from 6.8% to 20.7% over the same stretch.

But the pace has eased. In 2025 the current-smoker figure added just 1.0 point (32.8% → 33.8%), and the never-regular-smoker segment has hovered between 2.7% and 2.9% for three straight years. With overall e-cig use sitting near 9.9%–10.0% for a second year - having just passed cigarette smoking for the first time in 2024 - Britain looks less like a growth story and more like a market sorting itself into segments.

4. The Segment Worth Noticing: A Million People Who Never Really Smoked

This is the part that should grab a retailer's attention. Roughly 1.1 million adults who've never been regular cigarette smokers now use e-cigarettes. Their individual rate is small - 2.9% in 2025 - but the pool they come from is the biggest of the three (~36.4 million people), which is exactly why they total a fifth of all vapers.

The honest caveats matter here. That 2025 figure's 95% confidence interval runs 2.3% to 3.5%, and it overlaps last year's - so don't read a "breakout" into a single point estimate. And the ONS does not measure flavor preference, so nothing in the data proves these users picked mint over tobacco. Still, the pattern is suggestive: a segment entering without a tobacco habit is precisely the one that fresh and fruity, non-tobacco flavors are usually aimed at.

5. What That Means for the Flavor Shelf

The data won't tell you which flavor to stock. But it does tell you the customer is three people, not one - and the two segments that are newest and hardest to win (dual users, and especially the never-regular-smokers) are the least tied to a tobacco habit.

That's where a wide, fresh-leaning flavor range earns shelf space. It isn't about chasing ex-smokers who want a familiar nicotine hit; it's about the people who never smoked regularly in the first place.

One line of honesty: high-puff, flavor-forward disposables like these are built for the high-volume, flavor-driven end of the market, and whether any of them can be sold in a given country - including the UK - is a regulatory question, not a market-trend one. The ONS numbers describe demand; they don't hand anyone a compliance pass.

6. A Balanced Read

Strip it back and 2025 Britain is three things at once: a mature headline (use flat near 10%, e-cigarettes now ahead of cigarettes), a persistent dual-use trend (about a third of smokers also vape), and a quiet, stable minority who never really smoked (~1.1 million).

For brands and distributors, the takeaway is less "the market is growing" and more "the market is segmenting." The winners will be the ones who stop treating vapers as a single customer and start matching product to each of the three - capacity for the daily users, transition formats for the dual users, broad fresh flavors for the people who never smoked. What none of this can tell you, because the survey simply doesn't track it, is how many people actually finished the switch off cigarettes. That gap is the next dataset worth waiting for.

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