Are Shortfills Still Worth It After the Vape Tax?

Temple of Vape Team · August 16, 2026

Shortfills have been the value option in UK vaping for years: a large bottle of 0mg liquid with headroom left for nic shots, working out far cheaper per millilitre than buying 10ml bottles.

The Vaping Products Duty starting 1 October 2026 hits them harder than anything else on the shelf. Here's the honest position.

Nicotine-free doesn't mean duty-free

The most common misunderstanding we hear is that shortfills escape the duty because they contain no nicotine. They don't. The duty is a flat £2.20 per 10ml on vaping liquid regardless of nicotine content — 0mg shortfills, 20mg nic salts and everything between are charged identically.

So a 100ml shortfill carries £22 of duty, about £26.40 once VAT is applied. Your nic shots are liquid too: two 10ml shots add a further £5.28.

What a made-up bottle costs

Take a typical 100ml shortfill at around £12 today, plus two nic shots at roughly £1 each:

Today — about £14 for 120ml.
From October — about £14 plus £26.40 plus £5.28, so roughly £45 for the same 120ml.

That's a bottle going up by more than three times. The tax portion becomes substantially larger than the liquid portion. There's no way to dress that up: for high-volume sub-ohm vapers, this is the single biggest cost change in the UK market in years.

Why "buy bigger to save" stops working

The old advice was straightforward — buy the largest bottle you can, because price per millilitre falls as volume rises. That's still true of the *liquid*, but the duty is flat per millilitre. You pay 26.4p per ml whether you buy 10ml or 100ml.

So volume buying no longer dilutes the tax at all. It only spreads the bottle and brand cost, which after October is the smaller half of what you're paying. The lever that used to save you money has lost most of its power.

Where shortfills still make sense

They're not finished — just narrower in appeal:

You genuinely prefer 0mg or very low nicotine. If you're vaping 0mg by choice, shortfills remain the only sensible way to buy volume.
You want flavours that don't exist in 10ml nic salt form. Plenty of dessert and complex mixes are shortfill-only.
You're a DTL vaper who isn't willing to switch style. Shortfills are still cheaper per millilitre than prefilled pods by a wide margin — see the vape tax and prefilled pods.
You mix your own strength precisely. Nic shots give you control that fixed-strength bottles don't.

Where they don't

If you're using a shortfill because it was the cheapest way to get nicotine, that reasoning no longer holds. A vaper getting through 100ml a week pays roughly £26.40 a week in duty alone. The same person on an MTL pod kit with 20mg nic salts might use 12ml a week — about £3.17 in duty, for the same nicotine.

That's not a small optimisation. It's the difference between roughly £1,370 and £165 a year in tax. Our guide to the cheapest way to vape after the tax works through the change properly, and nic salt vs freebase explains why the strengths differ so much.

Before October

If shortfills are your format and you've no intention of changing, buying a few months ahead is reasonable — bearing in mind shelf life and storage. We've covered that in should you stockpile e-liquid and does e-liquid expire.

Either way, it's worth trying an MTL kit before the date rather than after. If it suits you, the saving is permanent.