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Cigar and cigarillo: nicotine content

A cigar delivers nicotine even when the smoke is never inhaled, because the tobacco it is made from produces alkaline smoke that the lining of the mouth can absorb. The dose is governed mostly by how much tobacco is in the object.

This is a reference page about what is printed on packs and what EU law caps. It is not medical advice, not a diagnosis and not a recommendation to use any product here. Nicotine is addictive and every product on this page can sustain that dependence. If you use nicotine and want to stop, a pharmacist, a doctor or your national cessation service will help you more than a table will.

What the number on the pack is

Why not inhaling does not mean not absorbing

Cigars are made from air-cured and fermented tobacco, and the smoke from it is alkaline rather than acidic. Because nicotine is a weak base with a pKa near 8, an alkaline environment leaves it largely un-ionised, and in that form it crosses the mucous membranes of the mouth readily. A cigar smoker who holds smoke in the mouth and never draws it into the lungs is still absorbing nicotine through the cheeks, gums and tongue.

This is the same chemistry that makes snus, nicotine pouches and nicotine gum work, and it is precisely the chemistry a cigarette lacks. It is also why the common belief that cigars are not addictive because the smoke is not inhaled does not hold up.

Size is the dominant variable

Nicotine per gram of tobacco does not differ enormously between cigar leaf and cigarette leaf. What differs enormously is the mass. A cigarette contains under a gram of tobacco. A cigarillo is roughly in that region. A large cigar can contain several grams and the biggest formats contain far more, which is the basis of the widely repeated public-health statement that one large cigar can hold as much tobacco as an entire pack of cigarettes.

That makes the nicotine available in a single large cigar an order of magnitude above a cigarette, even though only a fraction is absorbed through the mouth in a single sitting. It also makes any attempt to convert cigars to a cigarette equivalent meaningless without knowing the size of the cigar.

A slower curve than a cigarette

A cigar is smoked over thirty to ninety minutes and absorbed through a much slower route. Plasma nicotine rises gradually rather than spiking, and stays raised for a long time afterwards. The subjective experience differs from a cigarette for that reason, but the total exposure over a session can be substantial and dependence in regular cigar smokers is well documented.

Little cigars are a different problem

The boundary between a cigarette and a small cigar is a legal and tax boundary as much as a physical one. Some little cigars are cigarette-shaped, cigarette-sized and smoked exactly like cigarettes, including inhalation, which returns them to the fast lung route while keeping them outside the rules written for cigarettes. If a product is being inhaled, treat it as a cigarette regardless of what it is called.

Against a cigarette

The only figure that lets any of these formats be compared is what a smoker actually absorbs: roughly 1 to 1.5 mg of nicotine per cigarette, or something in the region of 20 to 30 mg across a twenty-a-day habit. That is a measured absorbed dose, and it is not the same kind of number as the one on most packs.

This is burned or heated tobacco reaching the lung, so the speed is in the cigarette range even where the total nicotine is not. Comparisons on total alone will understate how reinforcing it is.

Quitting from here

Cigar-only smokers are frequently left out of cessation offers built around cigarettes. Licensed replacement products are licensed for nicotine dependence, not for cigarettes specifically, and the oral forms match the absorption route a cigar already uses.

The pattern with the most evidence behind it is the same whichever product you are stopping. A long-acting form holds the baseline so that withdrawal is not generating cravings all day, and a fast-acting form is there for the moments a craving still arrives. Cochrane reviews of nicotine replacement therapy find that using it improves the chance of stopping compared with no medication, and that combining a patch with a fast-acting form does better than either on its own. Behavioural support on top of medication does better again.

Two things are worth knowing before you start. Under-dosing is the usual failure: people choose the low strength, use it less often than the label says, and conclude that replacement does not work for them. And prescription medicines exist for tobacco dependence as well; those are a conversation with a clinician rather than a shelf decision.

National services are free and staffed by people who do this all day. In Estonia the National Institute for Health Development runs cessation counselling and publishes the current clinic and helpline list. In Finland the Stumppi service run by Filha covers the same ground. In Sweden it is Sluta-Roka-Linjen. Your pharmacy will know the local one.

Source: Cochrane Tobacco Addiction Group reviews of nicotine replacement therapy and of combination therapy · checked 2026-09-06

Frequently asked questions

Sources: EU Tobacco Products Directive 2014/40/EU · Benowitz, Hukkanen and Jacob, Nicotine chemistry, metabolism, kinetics and biomarkers, Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology, 2009 · checked 2026-09-06

Other formats

All formats, the conversion tables and the EU caps are on the hub page.