States with the Most Vapers

About 1 in 9 adults in Oklahoma (10.79%) currently vape — the highest rate in the country, and more than double the 5.14% in Maryland, which ranks last. That gap is roughly two-to-one, putting vaping in the same wide-spread company as our depression and smoking maps. But what's most striking about the top of this ranking is how tightly it's packed: the difference between #1 Oklahoma (10.79%) and #5 West Virginia (10.47%) is barely three-tenths of a percentage point. The leaders aren't running away from the pack — they're clustered almost on top of one another.

Geographically, the top is anchored in the South-Central and Appalachian belt: Oklahoma, Kentucky (10.74%), Arkansas (10.68%), and West Virginia (10.47%) sit at or near the summit, with Wyoming (10.7%) the one Mountain-West outlier breaking into the top three. That's a familiar neighborhood. West Virginia in particular is a fixture at the top of our health maps — it's #1 for adult smokers (20.78%), #1 for obesity (41.4%), and #1 for the worst self-rated health (26.31%) — so seeing it among the heaviest-vaping states fits a broader regional pattern of higher tobacco and nicotine use.

It's worth being precise about what this metric does and doesn't capture. BRFSS asks adults whether they currently use e-cigarettes, so this is a snapshot of present-day vaping, not lifetime experimentation or former use. It also runs partly opposite to traditional smoking: some of the same states rank high on both, which may reflect a regional nicotine culture rather than vaping simply replacing cigarettes. And because the figure is self-reported, it leans on how openly people answer — generally a smaller concern for a behavior as common and socially visible as vaping, but a reason to treat tiny rank gaps like the one separating Oklahoma from West Virginia as effectively a tie rather than a meaningful lead.

At the bottom, the Northeast does the clustering instead. Maryland (5.14%) and Massachusetts (5.61%) post the two lowest rates, with Maryland's under half of Oklahoma's. States in this region tend to combine higher cigarette taxes, stricter tobacco-control policies, and — in several cases — flavored-vape restrictions, all of which could help explain the lower current-use rates, though the survey itself measures only the behavior, not its causes. The honest read is that this map shows *where* current vaping is most and least common, and leaves the *why* to be inferred carefully.

A note on method: every state here comes from the same CDC survey (BRFSS), one year (2024), and one definition — adults who currently use e-cigarettes — so the 50-state comparison is apples-to-apples. The one exception is Tennessee, shown with its 2023 value (10.2%), because CDC hadn't released a 2024 figure for it; it's flagged on the map for that reason. The numbers are CDC's; the ranking and analysis are ours.