Both camps are right, because it depends entirely on what you vape. The duty is a flat £2.20 per 10ml of e-liquid from 1 October 2026, and standard VAT then applies on top of the duty, so the real shelf price rise works out at roughly £2.64 per 10ml. That is a flat charge per volume, which is why the impact is so uneven.

On your usage - two 10ml bottles a week - you are looking at roughly £5.28 a week more, so somewhere around £21 a month. Uncomfortable, but survivable. The people talking about liquid doubling are shortfill users: a 100ml shortfill carries ten times the duty, so £12 to £16 bottles land at something like £38 to £43. That is where the eye-watering numbers come from.

Worth knowing: hardware is not affected. Devices, pods, coils and batteries stay on standard VAT only, so there is no reason to panic-buy a spare XLIM. And there is a deadline on the other side of it - duty stamps are required on packaging from 1 October, and it becomes a criminal offence to sell unstamped stock after 31 March 2027, so retailers have a window to clear old stock rather than a cliff edge. Full breakdown with the per-product table is in our UK vape duty October 2026 guide.

The flat-per-10ml thing is the bit that took me a while to get my head round. It means the cheaper your liquid already is, the bigger the percentage hit. A £3 bottle going to £5.60 is nearly double in percentage terms even though it is the smallest increase in actual money.

Genuinely glad hardware is exempt. I had half convinced myself I needed to buy a backup device before October. Sounds like the sensible move is just to not change anything and accept the liquid goes up.

Right, so about £21 a month for me rather than the apocalypse some people were predicting. Still annoying but it is not going to send me back to cigarettes, which at those prices would be far worse anyway. Thanks for laying out the actual figures.