Visualizing The Decline & Fall Of Smoking Among Young American Adults.

Today, fewer than one in five young American adults reported smoking cigarettes in the past year—with smoking having declined more than 50% from its peak.

While occasional and social smoking among young adults persists, the overall trend from 1988 to 2023 across casual and heavy smoking reveals a remarkable and sustained decline.

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Dorothy Neufeld, shows the percentage of U.S. young adults aged 19-30 who have smoked cigarettes over 12 months since 1988, based on data from the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.

Trends in Cigarette Smoking in Young Americans (1988-2023)

More than one-third (37.5%) of young adults in the U.S. smoked cigarettes in 1988, when the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research first started measuring data.

This figure has declined by almost half in 2023, with less than one-fifth (18.8%) of young adults smoking cigarettes in the last 12 months.

Cigarette smoking among 19 to 30 year-olds peaked in 1998 at 39.7%, and has declined steadily since then. For the 14 year period from 2004 to 2017, cigarette smoking rates declined every single year, only bumping up slightly in 2018 and now most recently in 2023 to 18.8%.

Despite the one percentage point uptick in past 12-month smoking in 2023, every measure—whether past 12-month, past 30-day, daily, or heavy use—has experienced significant decreases over both the past five and 10 years.

Daily cigarette smoking in young adults has continued to fall in 2023 to 3.6%, and only 2% of young adults reported smoking half a pack or more a day.

While cigarette smoking has declined, vaping has surged among young adults in the United States. This graphic shows the surge in cannabis and nicotine vaping since 2017.