Countries with the Highest Smoking Rates
Key Findings
About This Dataset
Countries with the Highest Smoking RatesSmall Pacific island nations and Southeast Asia dominate the top of the smoking rankings. Nauru has the world's highest adult tobacco-use rate at 48.5%, followed by Myanmar (44.1%) and Kiribati (40.6%) - in each of these, roughly two in five adults use tobacco. Southeast Asian countries feature heavily, with Papua New Guinea (39.3%), Timor-Leste (39.2%) and Indonesia (37.6%) all near 40%. The other cluster is the Balkans and Baltic region of Europe: Serbia (39.8%), Bulgaria (39.0%), Latvia (37.0%) and Croatia (36.9%) all rank among the world's heaviest-smoking populations, reflecting weaker tobacco-control policies than in Western Europe. Lebanon (38.2%) is the only Middle Eastern entry. The list highlights how tobacco use has shifted toward lower- and middle-income countries even as it falls across the wealthy West.
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- World Health Organization (WHO)
- Coverage
- 12 entities · 12 observations
- Measure
- Adult Tobacco Use Prevalence (% of Adults 15+)
- Last updated
- 14 July 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
- Values are shown as reported by the source. Nothing is rescaled, rebased or converted — the only changes are thousand separators and decimals shown to two places.
- Entities are ranked highest-first on their value.
Data Sources & References
All external sources cited in this dataset
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How these countries rank across all our charts
Each country's page lists its position in every ranking on ANYSTAT.
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