Duty-Free Tobacco: Allowance, Cartons & Airport Prices 2026

Tobacco is the most price-sensitive thing sold in an airport, and the most heavily regulated. Two questions decide whether a duty-free purchase is worth making: how much you are allowed to carry, and whether the shop in front of you is duty-free at all. Most travellers get the second one wrong.

How much tobacco you can bring

Arriving in an EU country from outside the EU, each traveller aged 17 or over may bring in, free of duty and tax:

• 200 cigarettes, or
• 100 cigarillos, or
• 50 cigars, or
• 250g of smoking tobacco.

The word doing all the work there is or. This is one allowance in four alternative forms, not four separate allowances. You may split it proportionally — 100 cigarettes plus 125g of tobacco is half of each, and fine — but a full carton plus a full pouch is over the limit.

What 200 cigarettes looks like

Exactly one carton. A standard carton is 10 packs of 20, which is 200 on the nose. Two people travelling together each carry their own allowance, so two cartons between them is fine — provided each person carries their own.

Duty-free shops will sell you more than your allowance without comment. The shop is not responsible for your customs declaration; you are.

Heated tobacco: TEREA, HEETS and IQOS

Heated-tobacco sticks are among the fastest-growing categories in airport retail and among the most confusing at the border. They are not cigarettes for customs purposes. They count as smoking tobacco, which puts them under the 250g line rather than the 200-cigarette one.

Since a single stick weighs a fraction of a gram, that works out generously in practice. But it is still one shared allowance: sticks, a carton of cigarettes and a pouch of rolling tobacco all draw on the same budget.

Prices for the same pack vary noticeably between airports, which is what makes them worth checking before you fly — see TEREA prices, IQOS, or the full tobacco category.

The mistake almost everyone makes

There is no duty-free tobacco on flights within the EU. Duty-free sales for intra-EU travel were abolished in 1999. The shop at the gate is still there, still has "duty free" over the door, and will still sell you cigarettes — but if you are flying Frankfurt to Madrid, that tobacco is duty-paid at local rates.

This matters more for tobacco than for anything else on the shelf, because excise duty is where most of the price sits. A carton bought airside on an intra-EU route is priced much like a carton bought in town. Genuine duty-free tobacco requires a destination outside the EU.

Travelling within the EU you are covered instead by personal-use guide levels, which are far higher than the duty-free allowance — but the duty has already been paid in the country of purchase. Which is exactly why comparing the shelf price between airports still pays.

Where tobacco is actually cheaper

Tobacco pricing is driven by national excise duty far more than by the retailer, so the gap between two airports can be large for an identical pack — and it does not follow the pattern people expect. The only reliable way to know is to check the specific product across the airports on your route.

Compare the same pack side by side in the tobacco category, or see the biggest current price gaps.

Before you buy

• Check your destination, not your departure. The allowance that binds you is the one where you arrive.
• Age limits are set locally. The EU allowance applies from 17, but the legal purchase age is higher in several countries.
• Connecting flights complicate things. Keep the sealed bag and the receipt — a second security screening may ask for both.

Country-specific limits: Germany, France, Spain, Austria, Italy, Hungary and Japan — or the EU allowance overview.