The exact same vaping product can cost you nearly eighteen dollars more in taxes depending on which side of a state line you're standing on. Minnesota and Washington lead the country with a $17.90 tax burden on vaping products, while six red states tack on exactly $0.36. That's not a rounding error. That's a policy choice.
Forty-Nine Times More Expensive, Depending on Your Governor's Party
According to Fox News Digital, citing analysis from the Tax Foundation, Minnesota and Washington tie for the highest vaping tax burden in the country at approximately $17.90 per product. Vermont comes in close behind at around $17.33. Meanwhile, Delaware, Georgia, Kansas, Nebraska, North Carolina and Wisconsin each add just $0.36 to the same product.
That is not a minor regional price variation. That is a chasm. A consumer in Spokane, Washington is being taxed at roughly fifty times the rate of someone buying the identical product in Raleigh, North Carolina. Same nicotine. Same vape. Completely different tax bill.
Sixteen states levy no statewide vape tax at all, which means for residents in those states the only thing standing between them and shelf price is their own budget. For everyone in a high-tax blue state, there's an extra layer of government between their wallet and their habit.
The Tax Foundation Guy Tried to Make This Sound Complicated
Adam Hoffer, director of excise tax policy at the Tax Foundation, told Fox News Digital that vaping taxes are a genuinely chaotic mess from a policy standpoint. "Unlike other excise taxes, like those on gasoline or even cigarettes, vape taxes have almost no conformity across U.S. states," he said. Products get taxed by volume, by retail price, by wholesale price, sometimes differently depending on the type of device.
Hoffer's point is that it's hard to do a clean apples-to-apples comparison. Fair enough. But when you do the work to standardize the analysis, as the Tax Foundation did, the picture gets very clear very fast. Blue states are hammering vaping products with high taxes. Red states mostly aren't.
The methodological messiness is real, but it doesn't obscure the outcome. Consumers in high-tax states are paying dramatically more. That part is not complicated.
This Is Cigarette Tax Revenue in a Halloween Costume
Here's the part that should probably get more attention. Hoffer told Fox News Digital that a major driver of rising vape taxes is that cigarette tax revenue is declining as fewer Americans smoke. States got used to that money, and now they need to replace it with something.
"Some states are simply trying to replace their cigarette tax revenue with taxes on things like vaping products," Hoffer said. Washington and Minnesota, the two states tied for the highest burden, both tax many vaping products at 95% of wholesale price. As Hoffer put it, "In some cases, you can be close to doubling the legal price of the product in the state."
So the pitch to voters in those states was, at some point, that taxing cigarettes heavily was a public health measure. Now that it worked, and smoking rates actually fell, the government response is to pivot to taxing the thing people switched to instead. You quit smoking and started vaping and the state found you anyway. Congratulations on your improved lung capacity. That'll be eighteen dollars.
People Are Just Driving to the Next State
Hoffer raised a predictable consequence of massive tax disparities between neighboring states: people drive across the border and buy their vapes somewhere cheaper. He specifically pointed to the Washington D.C. region, where Maryland and Virginia are both nearby and carry different tax burdens. You don't have to be an economist to figure out what happens next.
This is the eternal problem with excise taxes set dramatically higher than neighboring jurisdictions. The revenue projections assume people will just absorb the cost. Some do. A lot don't. They find the workaround, which in this case is a forty-minute drive. The state gets less revenue than projected, local retailers lose sales, and the tax achieves a fraction of its intended effect while still managing to annoy everyone involved.
It happens with cigarettes. It happens with alcohol. It happens with cannabis in states where the legal tax burden is so high that the illegal market stays competitive. Vaping is just the latest chapter in the same story.
The Dingo Take
Look, nobody is here to argue that vaping is good for you or that governments have zero legitimate interest in taxing it. They do. The public health case for discouraging nicotine use through price is real and has decades of research behind it. The problem is that a $17.90 tax burden in Washington while the same product gets a $0.36 tag in Georgia isn't a coherent national public health policy. It's fifty different states doing fifty different things, mostly driven by whoever needs budget revenue this fiscal year.
The Fox News framing here is predictably partisan, and that's worth naming. The piece exists to make blue states look punitive and red states look like libertarian paradises of freedom and cheap vaping. The actual story is more boring and more universal: governments at every level love excise taxes because voters hate income tax hikes, and excise taxes are easier to sell politically. Red states will get here eventually. They always do.
But right now, in the summer of 2026, the numbers are what they are. If you live in Minnesota and you vape, you are paying fifty times the tax rate of your cousin in Nebraska. That is a real thing happening to real people, and the fact that Fox News is the outlet reporting it doesn't make it less true. Sometimes the stopped clock is right. The vape tax gap is enormous, it's growing, and it deserves more scrutiny than it's getting from anyone other than the people writing the checks.
