How Much Will Vaping Cost After the Vape Tax?

Temple of Vape Team · August 12, 2026

From 1 October 2026 the UK's new Vaping Products Duty adds a flat charge to every millilitre of vaping liquid sold here. The headline rate is simple. What it actually does to your weekly spend depends entirely on how much liquid you get through — and that varies enormously between a pod vaper and a sub-ohm one.

Here are the numbers, without the scare headlines.

The rate, and the number that actually matters

The duty is £2.20 per 10ml, applied whether the liquid contains nicotine or not. But duty is added before VAT, and VAT is then charged on the duty-inclusive price. So if a retailer passes the full cost on, the figure that lands on the shelf edge is £2.64 per 10ml — that's 26.4p per millilitre.

That per-millilitre number is the one to hold onto, because the duty is flat and volume-based. It doesn't care whether the liquid is a £2 own-brand or a £20 premium bottle, and it doesn't care about nicotine strength.

What it adds, format by format

10ml nic salt — 10ml of liquid, so +£2.64. A bottle around £4 today lands nearer £6.60.
2ml prefilled pod — +53p per pod. On a four-pack, about £2.11.
2ml disposable — +53p per device.
50ml shortfill — +£13.20 on the bottle itself.
100ml shortfill — +£26.40 on the bottle, before you add nic shots.
Two 10ml nic shots — a further +£5.28.

So a 100ml shortfill made up to 120ml with two nic shots carries roughly £31.68 of duty and VAT that isn't there today.

Why big bottles no longer "beat" the tax

This is the bit most coverage gets wrong. Because the duty is charged per millilitre at a flat rate, buying a bigger bottle does not reduce the duty per millilitre. You pay 26.4p per ml whether you buy it in a 10ml bottle or a 100ml one.

Large bottles are still cheaper per millilitre than small ones — but that saving comes from the base liquid price and the packaging, not from the tax. After October, the tax portion of a shortfill will often be larger than the liquid portion was. That changes the maths on shortfills quite a bit.

What it means for your weekly spend

Work from your actual consumption:

Light MTL pod vaper, ~10ml a week — about £2.64 a week, roughly £137 a year.
Average refillable user, ~20ml a week — about £5.28 a week.
Heavy sub-ohm user, ~100ml a week — about £26.40 a week, and this is where the duty genuinely bites.

If you're in that third group, the single biggest lever isn't which shop you use — it's device style. A high-wattage sub-ohm setup gets through several times the liquid of an MTL pod kit for the same nicotine intake, because the nicotine strength is far lower. Moving to a pod kit on nic salts can cut your millilitres per week dramatically, and the duty falls with them.

The wider context

Tobacco duty rises at the same time, deliberately, so the gap between smoking and vaping is preserved. For anyone who has already switched, or is thinking about it, vaping remains substantially cheaper than smoking even with the duty applied.

We'll update this page with real shelf prices once duty-paid stock is flowing. For the full picture on dates and what happens next, see our key dates guide.