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SmokeCalc
Eleven minutes per cigarette

How much of your life has smoking cost?

Eleven minutes per cigarette — Shaw et al. (BMJ 2000), applied to your history.

Days lost
1,227
Years lost
3.4
Recoverable if you quit
3.4 years

Based on Shaw, Mitchell & Dorling, BMJ 2000: each cigarette costs about 11 minutes of life expectancy on average.

What this means

Eleven minutes a cigarette. A day every few days. A year, then another.

The math is from Shaw et al., BMJ 2000 — the same figure your doctor would cite.

Each cigarette you smoke costs about eleven minutes of life expectancy, according to Shaw, Mitchell and Dorling, BMJ 2000. For a pack-a-day smoker, that adds up to roughly a day of life lost every two to three days of smoking — a quiet, ongoing trade that most people never see the bill for.

Enter your daily cigarette count, the age you started, and your current age. The calculator does the multiplication. It also shows you how many years of life you can still recover by quitting — because the body is forgiving, and most of those lost years are not yet lost.

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Frequently asked questions

A BMJ analysis (Shaw, Mitchell & Dorling, 2000) estimated that each cigarette shortens life expectancy by about 11 minutes on average. The estimate was derived from 40-year mortality follow-up of British doctors (Doll et al., BMJ 1994).
A NEJM analysis of U.S. National Health Interview Survey data (Jha et al., 2013) found that, on average, lifelong smokers die more than 10 years earlier than never-smokers. Quitting at any age adds years back.
It comes from Shaw M, Mitchell R, Dorling D. "Time for a smoke? One cigarette reduces your life by 11 minutes." BMJ 2000;320:53 — a calculation that divided the 6.5-year smoking–non-smoker life-expectancy gap by an average lifetime cigarette count. The authors themselves described it as "admittedly crude."
Yes. The body begins healing within hours. Jha et al. (NEJM 2013) found that quitting at 25-34, 35-44, or 45-54 years of age gains back about 10, 9, and 6 years of life respectively. Even quitting at 60 adds years back.
Sourced fromCDC·WHO·NHS·American Lung Association