Nicotine Pouches vs Vapes: What Changes on 1 October 2026
Vaping liquid gets a £2.20 per 10 ml duty on 1 October 2026. Pouches do not. Here is what each one costs after that date, and what switching from a vape actually feels like.
On 1 October 2026 the UK puts a duty of £2.20 per 10 ml on all vaping liquid. VAT lands on top of that duty, so the real increase at the till is £2.64 per 10 ml. Nicotine pouches carry no vaping duty and no tobacco duty. A LUMI can is £1.59 today and £1.59 on 2 October. Keep reading to see exactly what that gap is worth over a year, and what switching actually involves.
Key takeaways
- Vaping liquid gets a £2.20 per 10 ml duty on 1 October 2026. With VAT on top, that is £2.64 per 10 ml at the till. A 100 ml shortfill goes up by £26.40.
- Pouches carry no duty. Not vaping duty, not tobacco duty. £1.59 a can, every flavour, every strength, before and after.
- Nine pouches a day is our UK average. That is £5.01 a week, £261 a year.
- Start at 6 mg. Every vaper, whatever you currently use. Most people end up at 12 mg, but you get there by stepping up, not by starting high.
- To find out what 12 mg feels like, use two 6 mg pouches at once. Six plus six. It is the cheapest test there is.
- There is no throat hit, and there is no spitting. A pouch trades the instant spike for a slow release over up to an hour. Nothing is chewed and nothing is spat out.
- A vape lets you dose by the puff. A pouch does not. The dose is fixed when it goes in, so the job is finding the strength that is right for you — not adjusting on the fly.
- Once it is in, the pouch’s release profile does the work, not you. That profile is set by whoever made the pouch. We make ours, in Poznań, and hold the pH to a set point on every batch.
- You can use one anywhere. No vapour, no smell, nobody around you is affected, and nobody can see it.
- Five flavours: Freeze Mint, Blue Ice, Forest Fruits, Watermelon, Citrus. First-time buyers almost always take the mix pack.
- Slim format: 34 mm, 0.7 g, 20 to a can, at 6, 12 or 18 mg per pouch. Made in our own facility in Poznań since 2023. Dispatched from Sheffield.
What actually changes on 1 October 2026
Vaping Products Duty starts on 1 October 2026 at £2.20 per 10 ml. It applies to all vaping liquid released on the UK market, including nicotine-free liquid, and every product has to carry a duty stamp.
Excise duty forms part of the price VAT is charged on. So a £2.20 duty becomes £2.64 by the time it reaches a customer.
Nicotine pouches are not in scope. There is no vaping duty on a pouch and no tobacco duty on a pouch.
What vaping costs after 1 October
| Format | Now | Duty + VAT | From 1 October | Rise |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 ml nic salt | £2.50–£5.00 | +£2.64 | £5.14–£7.64 | +53% to +106% |
| 10 ml, typical at £3.95 | £3.95 | +£2.64 | £6.59 | +67% |
| 2 ml prefilled pod | £3.50–£6.00 | +£0.53 | £4.03–£6.53 | +9% to +15% |
| 50 ml shortfill | £8.00–£12.00 | +£13.20 | £21.20–£25.20 | +110% to +165% |
| 100 ml shortfill | £12.00–£18.00 | +£26.40 | £38.40–£44.40 | +147% to +220% |
| LUMI can, 20 pouches | £1.59 | £0.00 | £1.59 | 0% |
Shortfills take the worst of it. The duty applies to all vaping liquid, nicotine-free base included, so the whole 100 ml is dutiable — not just the nicotine shot in it.
These figures assume the duty is passed through in full. Some retailers will absorb part of it at the start. None of them can absorb £2.64 per 10 ml for long.
What a week costs, both ways
HMRC’s own working figure for how much liquid a vaper gets through is 617 ml a year, which is 11.9 ml a week. Industry submissions argue that is too low, so the higher rows below use 20 ml and 40 ml a week.
The current spend figure — £7.60 a week for adults on reusable devices — comes from a Great Britain population study of 4,072 exclusive vapers, measured in April 2025.
| Now | From 1 October | Per year | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vaping at HMRC’s own usage figure, 11.9 ml/week | £7.60/week | £10.74/week | £558 |
| Vaping at 20 ml/week | £7.60/week | £12.88/week | £670 |
| Vaping at 40 ml/week | £7.60/week | £18.16/week | £944 |
| LUMI at 9 pouches a day | £5.01/week | £5.01/week | £261 |
Switching saves between £297 and £683 a year from 1 October.
Our line does not move on that date, because there is nothing on it to move.
The same money, put into pouches
| One vape purchase, after 1 October | LUMI cans for the same money | Pouches | Days at 9 a day |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 ml bottle at £6.59 | 4 cans | 80 | 9 days |
| 50 ml shortfill at £23.20 | 14 cans | 280 | 31 days |
| 100 ml shortfill at £41.40 | 26 cans | 520 | 58 days |
One 100 ml shortfill, after the duty, is nearly two months of pouches.
What every vaper asks before switching
Where is the throat hit?
There isn’t one. That is the trade, and it is worth understanding before you order.
Nicotine from a vape is absorbed across the surface of your lungs, which is an enormous area. It arrives fast and it arrives as a spike. A pouch works through the lining of your mouth, which is not an enormous area. The nicotine comes out slowly and steadily, and a pouch can sit under your lip for up to an hour. Almost nobody is on a vape for an hour straight.
So you are swapping an instant hit for a long, flat release. It is a different kind of nicotine, not a smaller one.
Do not go chasing the spike. The mistake is reaching for a high strength on day one because the first pouch did not feel like a lungful of vapour. Too much nicotine makes you feel sick — nausea, lightheadedness, hiccups — and that is a miserable way to meet the product. Start at 6 mg and step up.
With a vape you control the dose. With a pouch you choose it.
This is the difference that matters most, and almost nobody explains it.
When you vape, you decide how many puffs you take. That is how you land on the amount of nicotine you want — you adjust as you go, all day, without thinking about it. The device does not set your dose. You do.
A pouch does not work like that. The dose is fixed the moment it goes under your lip. There is no puffing harder, no taking a few extra, no easing off. The only adjustment available is putting two in at once, and that is a test, not a way to live.
So the job is different. With a vape you manage the dose. With a pouch you find the right strength once, and then you stop thinking about it. That is what the first can is for.
Get it right and you never need two at a time. Six, twelve or eighteen — one of them is yours.
And once the pouch is in, you are on the ride. Whatever nicotine you get over the next hour is decided by the release profile of that pouch, not by anything you do. You cannot speed it up and you cannot slow it down.
Which means the release profile is not a detail. It is the product. A vaper is their own dosing mechanism; a pouch user is handing that job to whoever made the pouch. Dialling it in is the manufacturer’s responsibility, and it is the thing we spend the most time on — the pH is set in our quality manual and every batch is adjusted to it, and the sodium alginate in the mix is there to shape how the nicotine comes out over a full session rather than arriving all at once and falling away.
That is the question worth asking any pouch brand: who set the release profile, and do they make the pouch themselves?
Do I need to spit?
No.
A LUMI pouch is not chewing tobacco and it is not dip. There is no tobacco leaf in it — the nicotine is freebase nicotine extracted from the tobacco plant, and what surrounds it is plant fibre, water and flavouring. Nothing is chewed and nothing is spat out.
Put it under the upper lip and leave it. Take it out when you have had enough and put it in the catch lid on top of the can. If you have never used a pouch, start with how to use nicotine pouches.
Will it taste like my vape?
No. Nothing that goes in your mouth tastes like something you inhale.
What we can tell you is how ours is built. There is more than one sweetener in a LUMI pouch on purpose. Sucralose on its own leaves a chemical aftertaste in the mouth, so it is blended with xylitol and acesulfame K to land on a sweetness that reads closer to sugar. The flavourings are food grade and they are about 8% of the contents.
A vape heats artificial sweetener and coats your whole mouth and throat in it. A pouch does not do that. The flavour sits quietly in the background under your lip — it is lighter, drier, and feels much cleaner because you are not inhaling it.
What do I do with my hands?
Vaping is hand-to-mouth and a pouch is not, so your hands are suddenly empty. There is a fix, and it takes about three days. See What people miss below.
Which strength a vaper should start on
6 mg. Every time, whatever you vape.
We are asked this constantly by people coming off a 20 mg/ml pod or refillable, and the answer does not change with what they were on. The nicotine release from a pouch is not the release from a vape, and the sensation is not the same either. Matching a number on a vape bottle to a number on a can gets you nowhere.
It matters more here than it does with a vape, because you only get one decision. A vaper adjusts their intake by the puff. A pouch user sets it when they buy the can.
12 mg is where most of our customers end up. You should still start at 6, and here is why.
The 6 + 6 test
Want to know what 12 mg feels like? Put two 6 mg pouches in at the same time.
Six plus six is twelve. You now know exactly what the next strength up does, before you have spent a penny on a can of it. If it is right, order 12 mg. If it is too much, you have saved yourself a bad week.
Work upwards, never downwards. Starting too high means finding your limit by going past it. Start at 6 mg.
Your first pouch, and the first fifteen minutes
There is a burning sensation at the start. For someone who has never used a pouch, the skin under the lip is more sensitive than they expect, and the first go is the sharpest one.
Here is what to do.
Put a pouch in. Keep it in for a few minutes only. Take it out. Wait, and feel how the nicotine is affecting you.
Taking the first one out early means no surprises. If it feels fine, put it back in for longer and get a proper sense of the release.
The burning and tingling settles. The skin on the gum and under the lip adapts quickly — a day or two of use, and it is a different experience.
How long a pouch stays in, and how many a day
Our UK average is nine pouches a day.
A pouch can sit under the lip for up to an hour. It is rare for anyone to be on a vape for more than a few minutes at a stretch. That difference is the whole adjustment.
Nine a day, at 20 pouches a can and £1.59 a can, is £5.01 a week.
Where you can use one
Everywhere.
That is the biggest single benefit of the product. A pouch produces no vapour and no smell. Nobody around you is affected by it. There are no places you have to step outside to use one.
And nobody knows you have one in. That matters more than it first sounds. Younger teenagers look up to older people and copy what they see them doing, which is how smoking spreads. A pouch is invisible. You are not impressing anyone by having one in, because nobody can tell.
Gums, teeth, and the pH question
Nicotine pouches do not stain teeth.
They do irritate the gum, and how much depends on the pH of the pouch. Ours does not run as high as some other brands, and the feedback we get — including in our own reviews — is that they are slightly gentler on the gum and do not cause the lip peeling that people report when they use a lot of pouches.
That consistency is deliberate. We set a pH in our quality manual and adjust every batch to it, so the nicotine release feels the same from one pouch to the next and one can to the next.
The single best piece of advice: swap sides. Do not always park the pouch in the same place. Use the left and the right of the upper lip.
What people miss, and what to do about it
Some people do miss the habit. Vaping is hand-to-mouth and a pouch is not. Your hands are suddenly empty and the muscle memory of reaching for a device is still there.
At the end of the day it is the nicotine that matters. It feels strange at first not to have to walk outside in the middle of winter to use your nicotine, but the adjustment is quick, and we do not see it being a problem for people. They are happy to be able to use nicotine anywhere.
Here is what actually works for the first week: keep a glass of ice water on your desk. Every time your muscle memory fires and you instinctively reach for a vape that isn’t there, take a sip of water. It satisfies the physical hand-to-mouth reflex, and it usually breaks the old habit within three days.
Most switching happens gradually. People start using pouches in the places where they cannot vape, and over time they move across completely.
Very few go back. Why would you go back to a product you have to go outdoors to use and that is about to get considerably more expensive?
Flavours
Vapes will always have more flavours than pouches. That is the product, not the effort. It is far easier to do a large flavour range in liquid.
We make five, all at the same price:
- Freeze Mint — our top seller
- Blue Ice — mint and menthol, a little sweeter
- Forest Fruits
- Watermelon
- Citrus
Four more are in development and are targeted for the end of 2026.
Most people buying LUMI for the first time take the mix pack — five cans, one of each flavour, in the strength they pick. It is the way to find out what you actually like before committing to one. The mix pack is not on the public shop right now; start at 6 mg on the pouches page and pick a flavour there.
What is in a LUMI pouch
The pouch material is food-contact certified non-woven fabric.
Plant fibre and water make up around 86% of the contents. The nicotine is freebase nicotine, extracted from the tobacco plant. The flavourings are food grade.
| Ingredient | Function | % of pouch contents |
|---|---|---|
| Microcrystalline cellulose (E460) | Plant fibre filler | ~45% |
| Water | Moisture | ~41% |
| Flavourings | Taste | ~8% |
| Salt (sodium chloride) | Stabiliser / taste | < 5% |
| Nicotine | Active | < 2.6% (varies by strength) |
| Xylitol (E967) | Sweetener | < 2% |
| Sodium alginate (E401) | Thickener, and it shapes the nicotine release | < 1% |
| Sodium carbonate (E500) | Acidity regulator | < 1% |
| Sucralose (E955) | Sweetener — selected flavours | < 0.2% |
| Potassium sorbate (E202) | Preservative | < 0.2% |
| Acesulfame K (E950) | Sweetener | < 0.2% |
No tobacco leaf. The sodium carbonate is what holds the pH steady, which is what keeps the release consistent can to can.
Where pouches stand legally in the UK
The Tobacco and Vapes Act received Royal Assent on 29 April 2026, and nicotine pouches are finally regulated under it. That is a good thing.
The 18 age of sale for nicotine pouches comes into force on 29 October 2026. It is not in force yet. We have never sold to anyone under 18, before or after the law changed, and age verification runs at checkout.
Pouches do not carry the duties that apply to vaping and tobacco products.
Two dates, four weeks apart, both worth knowing: vaping liquid gets taxed on 1 October, and pouches become properly age-regulated on 29 October.
What to do before 1 October
Start at 6 mg. Find out how pouches and the flavours work for you while there is still time to decide calmly rather than in reaction to a price rise.
Then get ready for a fairly extreme price increase on the vaping side. It arrives on 1 October and it is not coming back off.
FAQ
I vape 20 mg/ml all day. Which pouch strength do I start on?
6 mg. Whatever you vape. The release and the sensation are different enough that matching numbers does not work.
Most people end up at 12 mg — should I just start there?
No. Put two 6 mg pouches in at the same time and you will know exactly what 12 mg feels like. Step up, never down. Too much nicotine makes you feel sick.
Where is the throat hit?
There isn’t one. A vape puts nicotine across the whole surface of your lungs in seconds. A pouch releases it through the lining of your mouth over up to an hour. You are trading a spike for a long, flat release.
With a vape I just take more puffs when I want more. How does that work with a pouch?
It doesn’t. The dose is fixed when the pouch goes in. You cannot puff harder or take a few extra. That is why picking the right strength matters more with pouches than it ever did with a vape — and why we tell everyone to start at 6 mg and step up until one strength is simply right.
So what decides how much nicotine I actually get?
The release profile of the pouch. Once it is under your lip you are on the ride — the pouch delivers over the session and you have no throttle. That profile is set by the manufacturer, which is why it is worth knowing who made the pouch you are buying.
Do I need to spit?
No. A pouch is not chewing tobacco and not dip. Nothing is chewed and nothing is spat out.
Is there tobacco in it?
No tobacco leaf. The nicotine is freebase nicotine extracted from the tobacco plant. Everything else is plant fibre, water, flavouring, salt and sweeteners.
Will it taste like my vape?
No. A vape heats artificial sweetener and coats your whole mouth and throat in it. A pouch sits quietly under your lip — lighter, drier and cleaner, because you are not inhaling it. We also use three sweeteners rather than one, because sucralose alone leaves a chemical aftertaste.
Will I miss the hand-to-mouth habit?
Some people do at first. Keep a glass of ice water on your desk and sip it every time you reach for a vape that isn’t there. It usually breaks the habit within three days.
What does the first pouch feel like?
A burning, tingling sensation for the first few minutes. Take the first one out after a few minutes, wait, and see how the nicotine affects you before putting it back in for longer. It settles within a day or two.
How many will I get through?
Our UK average is nine a day. A pouch can stay in for up to an hour, which is a very different rhythm to vaping.
What does that cost?
£5.01 a week. £261 a year. £1.59 a can, every flavour and every strength.
Does the vape duty apply to pouches?
No. Vaping Products Duty applies to vaping liquid. Pouches carry no vaping duty and no tobacco duty.
How much more will my vape cost from 1 October?
£2.64 per 10 ml at the till, once VAT on the duty is counted. A 10 ml bottle at £3.95 becomes about £6.59. A 100 ml shortfill goes up by £26.40.
Can I use a pouch where I cannot vape?
Yes, everywhere. No vapour, no smell, and nobody can see it.
Will it stain my teeth or damage my gums?
Pouches do not stain teeth. They do irritate the gum. Swap sides — use both the left and the right of the upper lip.
Do people go back to vaping?
Very few. Most switch gradually — pouches first in the places they cannot vape, then across completely.
How many flavours do you make?
Five: Freeze Mint, Blue Ice, Forest Fruits, Watermelon and Citrus. Four more are targeted for the end of 2026.
What should I order first?
Start at 6 mg on the pouches page and pick a flavour. The mix pack (one can of each) is how most first-time buyers used to choose; it is not on the public shop at the moment.
What is the age limit?
18. That becomes law for pouches on 29 October 2026. We have always operated it.
18+ only. Contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive substance.
About the author
Joonas Kylmäkorpi is the founder of LUMI. He built the company’s nicotine pouch factory in Poznań, Poland, where every LUMI pouch is made, and he writes the UK guides. Everything here comes from that work and from the questions UK customers ask us.
Sources
- Vaping Products Duty and the Vaping Duty Stamps Scheme, from 1 October 2026 — Business Companion
- £2.20 per 10 ml plus VAT = £2.64 effective, worked example — Vape Superstore
- Before-and-after retail prices by format — Vapes Direct
- HMRC’s 617 ml per vaper per year consumption estimate, and the challenge to it — Clearing the Air
- Changes in expenditure on vaping in Great Britain, 2021–2025, n=4,072 — medRxiv
- Nicotine pouches: age of sale 18 from 29 October 2026 — ASH
- Tobacco and Vapes Act 2026, Royal Assent 29 April 2026 — Lewis Silkin