How much cheaper are HEETS than cigarettes?
By JC Connington
Date Published 05/07/2022
Both vaping and using HEETS tobacco sticks work out cheaper than smoking cigarettes, but how much do they cost? Here, we’ll look out how much heated tobacco costs when compared with the cost of cigarettes, and why it’s cheaper too.
How much does heated tobacco cost?
The recommended retail price of 20 HEETS is £5.50, making them cheaper than cigarettes. They’re £5.50 for 20 regardless of the HEETS variant. HEETS sticks are used alongside an IQOS device – the IQOS 3 DUO costs £39 with two packs of HEETS, but even taking this into account the use of heated tobacco remains cheaper than smoking cigarettes. We will look at the average cost of cigarettes below.
Comparing costs between HEETS and cigarettes
On average, a pack of 20 HEETS will be under half the price of a pack of 20 cigarettes. the average cost of a pack of 20 king size filter cigarettes in the UK Is £12.43. (As of February, 2022*). For somebody who smokes a pack of cigarettes a day, that would come to £385.33 over the course of a 31-day month. In comparison, using a pack of HEETS each day would cost £155 over the same time frame – a saving of over £200.
The price difference isn’t the only thing that sets heated tobacco sticks apart from cigarettes and other alternatives to smoking like vaping too. For example, HEETS use real tobacco, unlike vape devices, but the tobacco is heated rather than burned, unlike in cigarettes. IQOS provides cigarette-like satisfaction**, but smokers who switched to IQOS feel more comfortable getting close to people than they did after smoking a cigarette***. Each HEETS stick lasts for around six minutes or 14 puffs, like a cigarette, and both the IQOS device and the HEETS tobacco stick are designed to deliver an experience and ritual similar to smoking.
To find out exactly how much you might be able to save by switching from smoking to using heated tobacco, you can take a look at our savings calculator here.
Additional Benefits of Using IQOS over Cigarettes
There are other benefits when it comes to using heated tobacco. IQOS HeatControl Technology heats tobacco instead of burning it to deliver the true taste of tobacco. IQOS will leave significantly less staining on your curtains and furniture than cigarette smoke, and smokers who switched to IQOS say that there is less unpleasant feeling and aftertaste left in their mouth compared to after finishing smoking a cigarette****.
If you’d like to learn more about the differences between IQOS and HEETS and cigarettes, you can take a look at our guide, right here.
Or, if you’d like to try IQOS, with the IQOS Try Before You Buy home trial, you can experience IQOS at home. Just choose your device and pay £10 to cover the cost of two packs of HEETS, and we’ll deliver your kit to your door. After two weeks, you can either pay for the device or return it free of charge.
Sources
*Source: ONS dataset. RPI: Ave price – Cigarettes 20 king size filter, February 2022.
**Source: 3-month clinical studies conducted in US and Japan with 160 adult smokers each under real conditions (ambulatory).
***Source: Online survey conducted by third-party research agencies in 2016 and 2017 among 3,157 IQOS users in Japan, Switzerland, Italy, Romania and Spain.
****Source: Online survey conducted by third-party research agencies in 2015, 2016 and 2017 among 3,344 IQOS users in Japan, Switzerland, Italy, Romania and Russia.
