Media Release 30 November 2025

The rate of daily youth vaping has dropped to 7.1% among New Zealand’s Year 10 students. This is down from “peak vape” in 2022.

Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) chair Emeritus Professor Robert Beaglehole welcomed the low rates of smoking and the decrease in vaping as shown in the 2025 ASH Year 10 Snapshot Survey of over 30,000 students. This is one of the largest ongoing smoking and vaping surveys in the world, now in its 26th year.

“This is a major global success which we should be celebrating. We are raising a smoke-free generation. Since 2021, daily smoking has been at very low levels, about 1%.

There has been an even greater fall in regular vaping, which fell to 11.2% down from 14.1% the previous year, and now fewer than a third of students have ever tried vaping, which is great news.

Before we introduced progressively stricter regulations, vaping amongst youth took off. New Zealand now has regulations in place at a reasonable level; they are working to protect our young people.

Although there were significant decreases in daily vaping for Māori students (20.9% in 2024 to 16.5% in 2025), more needs to be done to address vaping and smoking rates for Māori and Pacific youth due to the persisting inequalities.

New Zealand’s smokefree journey is a global success story, and we are leading the way. Youth smoking has almost disappeared, and vaping continues to fall.

If you don’t smoke, don’t vape. Vaping helps adult smokers quit and is much, much less harmful than smoking, but overregulation of vaping could push people back to smoking, and, of course, we must continue to protect children from vaping,” said Beaglehole.

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Notes to editors:
ASH is a completely independent NGO and does not receive any funding or support from the tobacco, vaping or medicinal nicotine industries.

The ASH Year 10 Snapshot Survey is one of the largest ongoing youth smoking and vaping surveys in the world, with 31,402 students participating in 2025.

Factsheets and data available at www.ash.org.nz

Media contact:
Emeritus Professor Robert Beaglehole ASH Chair 021 024 98065