Air quality cigarette equivalent, by city

Type your city into the tool above. It looks up the city's latest annual-mean PM2.5 in the WHO Ambient Air Quality Database and divides by 22 µg/m³, the Berkeley Earth figure for the fine-particle dose of one cigarette. Delhi comes out at roughly five cigarettes a day; New York, Seattle and Stockholm sit well under half a cigarette a day.

An average. The WHO database publishes one annual-mean PM2.5 value per city per year, from that city's official monitoring stations. So the cigarette number is what a resident breathes on a typical day over a whole year, not a live reading. On a wildfire or smog day the real figure can be ten times higher, which is exactly why a personal monitor is useful.

From the WHO Ambient Air Quality Database, version 8.0 (June 2026). WHO compiles it from official national and sub-national monitoring networks (the European Environment Agency for EU countries), covering 8,000+ settlements in 127 countries with measurements from 2010 to 2024. We use each city's most recent year and show that year next to the result. For a dozen major cities whose WHO row is several years old or missing (London, Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Lahore, Dhaka, Santiago, Sydney, Mexico City) we use the newer annual mean published by the city's or country's own environment agency, linked next to the number.

It is the equivalence published by Berkeley Earth physicists Richard and Elizabeth Muller in 2015. They compared the death rate from smoking (about 1.37 deaths per million cigarettes) with the mortality attributed to PM2.5 exposure, and found that living at 22 µg/m³ of PM2.5 carries roughly the same risk as one cigarette per day. It is a rule of thumb, not a medical equivalence, and it only covers fine particles, not nicotine or the other chemicals in tobacco smoke.

The WHO database only includes places with official ground monitoring that report to WHO, so smaller towns and some countries are missing. Use the 'Near me' button to find the closest monitored city, or if you know a PM2.5 or AQI reading for your area, the AQI to cigarettes calculator converts it directly.

No. The US AQI is a 0–500 scale built from pollutant concentrations, and it is not linear in PM2.5. We show the AQI that corresponds to each city's annual-mean PM2.5 for context, but the cigarette equivalence is calculated from the PM2.5 concentration itself, which is what the WHO publishes.