Banbury area smokers spend £43.8m a year on cigarettes, figures show

The figures for Cherwell works out at £322 for every adult. The amount is 4% higher than the UK figure of £309.

The statics for West Oxfordshire are about £28.6m with an estimated 8,200 smokers and Stratford on Avon district's 7,100 smokers spend about £24.8m a year or £205 per adult.

West Northamptonshire's figure is about £95m a year or £251 for every adult. However, West Northants is a unitary authority so larger than the other Banburyshire districts and hard to compare.

Across all four areas that comes to about £192 million a year, from an estimated 54,900 smokers. The UK figure is £309 for every adult, so Cherwell is the only one of the four above it.

Across Oxfordshire, smokers spend about £154.9 million a year, or £251 for every adult. Cherwell has the highest figure in Oxfordshire for its size, and the Vale of White Horse has the lowest at £188.

Vaping retailer Ecigone used the smoking rate for every council area in the UK, published by the Office for National Statistics on October 6, to calculate smoking statistics for 359 council areas.

Each smoker was then costed at the ONS average of 10 cigarettes a day and an average price of about £19.18 for a pack of 20 since tobacco duty rose on 1 October. That comes to about £3,500 a year for each smoker.

Across the UK the bill adds up to about £17.2 billion a year, or £309 for every adult. In St Albans, the lowest of the areas with a reliable estimate, the figure is £151.

Birmingham has the biggest bill of any single council area. Its estimated 90,900 smokers spend about £318 million a year, ahead of Glasgow on £248 million and Leeds on £216 million. Smokers spend more than £100 million a year in 27 council areas.

Scotland spends the most of the four nations for its population, at £351 for every adult, followed by Wales on £337, Northern Ireland on £328 and England on £303. Yorkshire and the Humber is the highest-spending English region on £335, and the South East is the lowest on £276.

The price of a pack went up by about £1.21 on October 1 according to HM Revenue and Customs, when the yearly tobacco duty rise and a one-off extra increase arrived on the same day as the new duty on vape liquid.

Free help to stop smoking is available from local stop smoking services and through the NHS Quit Smoking app.

* Each smoker is costed at 10 cigarettes a day, the ONS average for Great Britain in 2025. The pack price of £19.18 is the last average price ONS published (£16.60 in January 2025), brought up to August 2026 with the ONS price index for cigarettes, plus the £1.21 that HM Revenue and Customs says the October 1 duty rise added. The same price and the same 10 a day are used everywhere, so the ranking follows each area's smoking rate. People who roll their own, smoke less often or buy cheaper tobacco will spend less than the figure used here and heavier smokers will spend more.