How many years does smoking take off your life?
On this page
More than 10 years on average, compared with people who never smoked. Quitting before 40 avoids about 90% of the extra risk. People who quit at 45 to 54 still gained about 6 years over people who kept smoking, and quitting at 60 still gave back about 3.
What we’d do
If you smoke, quitting comes before every other habit on this site, whatever your age. Use everything that helps, from nicotine replacement to prescription medicine to a full switch to a vape as a step off cigarettes, and if you slip, quit again. Each year sooner gives back more.
Why people think it’s too late
Smokers often feel the damage is already done, especially after 50. Or they know a relative who smoked into their 90s. Both ideas make quitting feel pointless. The numbers say the opposite, and they come from two big studies, one of them 50 years long.
The British doctors
In 1951, Richard Doll and his colleagues in Britain asked doctors about their smoking. They kept asking, and they followed 34,439 men for 50 years. Men born from 1900 to 1930 who smoked cigarettes and never stopped died about 10 years younger than lifelong non-smokers.
The quitting results are the hopeful part. Stopping at 60, 50, 40 or 30 gained about 3, 6, 9 or 10 years. For the men born around 1920, smoking for life tripled the death rate at each age. Quitting at 50 halved that risk, and quitting at 30 avoided almost all of it.
The same answer in Americans
A 2013 study in the New England Journal of Medicine followed 202,248 US adults interviewed from 1997 to 2004. Current smokers had about three times the death rate of people who never smoked. Of women who never smoked, 70% survived from 25 to 79, against 38% of women who smoked. For men it was 61% and 26%.
| Age you quit | Years gained over smokers who kept going | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 25 to 34 | about 10 | US adults, Jha 2013 |
| 35 to 44 | about 9 | US adults, Jha 2013 |
| 45 to 54 | about 6 | US adults, Jha 2013 |
| 60 | about 3 | British male doctors, Doll 2004 |
What quitting gives back finds the figure for your age.
The simple version
Smoking is like a leak in the roof. Every year it drips, more of the ceiling rots. Fix it at 35 and the house ends up nearly as good as one that never leaked. Fix it at 55 and you still save most of what’s left.
How it compares with the other habits
In the Harvard habits study, smoking 15 to 24 cigarettes a day went with 2.33 times the death rate of never smoking, and having quit carried 1.41 times. Our calculator always puts quitting first for a smoker. For a 50-year-old who smokes and does no exercise, moving 30 minutes a day comes out a touch higher in years, but the sooner someone quits the more it gives back, so it leads.
The extra deaths in smokers come mostly from cancers, heart and blood vessel disease and lung disease. Quitting stops adding to that damage, which is why the age you stop counts for so much.
3 sources
- Jha P and others, 21st-century hazards of smoking and benefits of cessation in the United States, New England Journal of Medicine, 2013pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Doll R and others, Mortality in relation to smoking: 50 years' observations on male British doctors, BMJ, 2004pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Li Y and others, Impact of Healthy Lifestyle Factors on Life Expectancies in the US Population, Circulation, 2018pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
