Start at 6 mg per pouch if you vape a 20 mg/ml e-liquid, and at 9 to 11 mg if you vape a 5% pod. That is my reading of the evidence, not a published conversion — nobody publishes one. The honest answer is that your e-liquid strength tells you almost nothing about which pouch you need, and the thing that does tell you something is how soon after waking you reach for your vape.
This is the question I get asked in the most confident terms and can answer with the least confidence, because the number people want converted is not a dose. “20 mg/ml” is a concentration in a liquid you have not finished. “6 mg” on a can of pouches is the whole amount in one pouch. There is no arithmetic between them, and below I will show you that nobody — not a regulator, not a manufacturer, not a single published study — has ever built one.
What there is, instead, is a set of measurements that let you place yourself roughly, and one question borrowed from dependence research that works better than any millilitre figure. If you are coming at this from the other direction and want the walkthrough rather than the evidence, the first-pouch guide for people coming off vaping is the companion to this page.
Nobody has published a mg/ml to mg-per-pouch conversion, and here is the proof
I went looking for one in the places it would have to exist, and searched the bytes of each document rather than trusting a site search.
Across the four manufacturers who publish strength guidance in English — ZYN’s US site and FAQ, Velo’s UK nicotine-strength guide, Rogue and Nordic Spirit — the string mg/ml appears zero times in 2.7 million bytes. The companies selling you the pouch do not mention the unit printed on your e-liquid bottle anywhere in their own advice about strength.
It is not in the trial literature either. I pulled the full eligibility criteria for every registered nicotine-pouch study from the ClinicalTrials.gov API — 53 studies in one 157,352-byte response. Across all 53, mg/mL appears in zero eligibility criteria, and so does e-liquid. Twenty-five of the 53 describe their population in cigarettes per day. The registry speaks cigarettes; it has never once spoken millilitres.
The only authority that has ever asserted a nicotine equivalence for e-liquid is the EU legislature, and it equated e-liquid to cigarettes rather than to anything oral. Recital 38 of the Tobacco Products Directive says the 20 mg/ml ceiling exists because “This concentration allows for a delivery of nicotine that is comparable to the permitted dose of nicotine derived from a standard cigarette during the time needed to smoke such a cigarette.” So a conversion exists from e-liquid to cigarettes, declared by legislators in 2014. A conversion exists from pouches to cigarettes, measured in pharmacokinetic studies. Nobody has joined the two ends.
There are good mechanical reasons for that, and they are worth knowing because they are also the reasons you should distrust any blog that hands you a tidy table. Puff behaviour alone moves the dose enormously: in a BAT study of seven prototype e-liquids, the same liquid produced a peak plasma nicotine of 26.8 ng/mL on a fixed puffing regimen and 33.1 ng/mL when people puffed freely. Same bottle, same strength, 24% more nicotine in the blood, purely from how it was used. A number that unstable cannot be the input to a conversion.
Your e-liquid strength depends on which side of the Atlantic you bought it
Before anything else: find out what you are actually on, because the legal ceilings differ by a factor of two and a half and that difference is the single biggest determinant of where you should land.
In the UK and the EU there is a hard cap. Regulation 36(4) of the Tobacco and Related Products Regulations 2016 reads: “Nicotine-containing liquid which is presented for retail sale in an electronic cigarette or refill container must not contain nicotine in excess of 20 milligrams per millilitre.” The same instrument caps a refillable tank at 2 ml. The Directive behind it says the same thing in its own units — “the nicotine-containing liquid does not contain nicotine in excess of 20 mg/ml”.
In the United States there is no such cap at all, and I can show the absence rather than assert it. I read 21 U.S.C. § 387g — the section that gives FDA the power to set tobacco product standards — and in all 20,868 bytes of it the words electronic and liquid appear zero times, and there is no concentration figure of any kind. The same is true of 21 CFR parts 1100, 1140 and 1143. The only nicotine limit in the statute runs the other way: it bars FDA from “requiring the reduction of nicotine yields of a tobacco product to zero”. That is why 5% pods — roughly 50 mg/ml — are an ordinary American product and an illegal British one.
So “I vape 20 mg” and “I vape 5%” are not two ways of saying the same thing. They are two and a half times apart.
The measurements that let you anchor yourself, with their limits stated
Two bodies of pharmacokinetic work exist, from different cohorts under different protocols. Putting them side by side is the best available method and it is still a cross-study comparison, so treat the overlap as approximate rather than as a dose equivalence.
On the vaping side, the BAT study above measured peak plasma nicotine from Vuse ePod prototypes at 3.5% and 5%. On fixed puffing the seven prototypes ran from 18.7 to 26.8 ng/mL; puffing freely, 22.7 to 33.1 ng/mL. The participants’ own cigarettes, measured in the same study, gave 16.4 ng/mL. The paper’s conclusion, in its own words: “While e-liquid nicotine concentration significantly affected users’ nicotine uptake, the different combinations of benzoic, levulinic and lactic acid in the e-liquids assessed had limited impact on nicotine pharmacokinetics and product liking scores.” Funding, verbatim, because it matters: “The study was supported by British American Tobacco (Investments) Limited, the manufacturer of Vuse e-cigarettes.” All authors were employees of BAT, RAI Services or Reynolds American.
On the pouch side, the most complete single table is also BAT’s — “The study was supported by British American Tobacco (Investments) Limited, the manufacturer of Lyft and Velo smokeless oral nicotine pouches.” Thirty-five habitual snus users, five pouches and a cigarette, one product per day:
| Product | Nicotine per pouch | Peak plasma nicotine (geometric mean, ng/mL) | Time to peak (median, min) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Participant’s own cigarette | — | 13.9 | 7 |
| Lyft | 10 mg | 17.1 | 60 |
| Nordic Spirit | 9 mg | 18.4 | 62 |
| on! | 6 mg | 17.5 | 65 |
| Skruf | 8 mg | 13.0 | 60 |
| ZYN | 10 mg | 11.9 | 65 |
Read that table twice, because it contains the most useful warning on this page. The paper states it outright: “Plasma nicotine concentration was not associated with the nicotine contents of the NPs.” A 6 mg on! out-delivered a 10 mg ZYN. If the milligram number on a pouch can be beaten by a pouch with 40% less in it, then converting your e-liquid into a milligram figure would not have told you what you wanted even if a conversion existed. I have written at more length about why the label and the delivery come apart in the piece on nicotine delivery versus nicotine content.
Two other things from the table are worth carrying over to your first week. Every pouch peaked at 60 to 65 minutes against the cigarette’s 7, and a vape is closer to the cigarette than to the pouch on that axis. If you are used to a hit arriving in seconds, nothing on the pouch market will reproduce that, at any strength. Going stronger to chase it is the commonest way people overshoot.
What the pouch companies tell vapers, which is almost nothing
Nordic Spirit is the only maker I found that addresses vapers in its strength ladder at all, and look at where it puts them. Its three tiers read: “For existing adult smokers or vapers who are new to nicotine pouches”; then “For users of nicotine pouches before looking for a stronger nicotine delivery”; then “For experienced nicotine pouch users wanting a more intense sensation.” A vaper and a smoker get the identical recommendation — the entry tier — and the only thing that moves you up the ladder is pouch experience. Note also that the milligram figures for those three tiers appear on that page only inside image filenames, so I am not quoting them as the company’s words.
Velo does print figures — Mellow 4 mg–6 mg, Original 6 mg–11 mg, Intense 8 mg–17 mg — and gives an instruction that cannot be followed with anything Velo supplies: “Consider how much nicotine you usually intake (whether from smoking, vaping or something else) when buying VELO pouches.” Then mg/ml appears zero times in 313,877 bytes of that same guide. You are told to match your intake and given no means of doing it.
ZYN’s US site mentions vaping exactly once in 1.2 million bytes, and it is not advice: “ZYN uses a nicotine salt that is more stable than the nicotine used in some e-cigs, vaping, and liquids, which must be artificially protected from oxygen.” A shelf-life claim. ZYN publishes two strengths, 3 and 6 mg, with ZYN Ultra at 9 and 11 mg.
And if you are in the United States, the shelf is narrower than it looks. FDA’s authorised list, content current 30 October 2026, says “There are 67 nicotine pouch products authorized by the FDA.” and “These are the only nicotine pouch products that may be lawfully sold in the United States.” Counting the strengths on that list: 2 mg appears three times, 3 mg ten, 4 mg twenty-seven, 6 mg thirteen, 9 mg thirteen, and 11 mg once, on ZYN ULTRA Smooth. The lawful American range runs 2 to 11 mg, which is a narrower band than the European market offers.
The question that sorts vapers better than any millilitre figure
Authorised nicotine products do key dosing to consumption, but only for smokers. The nicotine patch label splits on “more than 10 cigarettes per day” versus 10 or fewer. The gum and lozenge do not ask about volume at all — they ask whether you smoke your first cigarette within 30 minutes of waking, and send you to 4 mg if you do. No label anywhere asks a question of a vaper.
The closest thing that exists is from dependence research. The Penn State Electronic Cigarette Dependence Index, published in 2015 from a survey of 3,609 e-cigarette users who had stopped smoking, has as its first item a time-to-first-vape-after-waking question, exactly parallel to the cigarette one. More usefully for this page, it found a dose gradient: “Those using zero nicotine liquid had significantly lower e-cig dependence scores than those using 1–12mg/ml, who scored significantly lower than those using 13 or greater mg/ml nicotine liquid”. The authors also reported that “Current e-cigarette users reported being less dependent on e-cigarettes than they retrospectively reported having been dependent on cigarettes prior to switching.”
That is a cross-sectional self-report survey, not a dosing study, and I could not obtain its funding statement — the full text is behind a publisher I cannot reach and the PMC deposit is abstract-only. Take it as the shape of the relationship rather than a scale. But the shape is useful: it bands vapers at 0, 1–12 and 13+ mg/ml, and it says urgency and concentration move together.
So the two questions I would actually ask, in order:
- How soon after waking do you vape? Within half an hour puts you at the top of whatever range your e-liquid suggests. An hour or more puts you at the bottom.
- Do you chain-vape all day or take deliberate sessions? All-day grazing on a low-strength liquid can add up to more nicotine than a few sessions on a strong one, and the pouch market’s answer to grazing is a weaker pouch used more often, not a stronger one.
Where I would actually start, and what to do in the first week
This is my judgement from the evidence above, clearly labelled as that. No regulator and no manufacturer has published a range for a vaper.
| What you vape now | Where I would start | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 12 mg/ml, a few sessions a day | 3–4 mg per pouch | Bottom of the authorised US band; Velo’s and Nordic Spirit’s entry tiers sit here |
| 20 mg/ml (UK/EU legal maximum), moderate use | 6 mg | Measured peak for a 6 mg pouch was 17.5 ng/mL, above the cigarette comparator in the same study |
| 20 mg/ml, first vape within 30 minutes of waking | 6–9 mg | Urgency is the axis the NRT labels treat as decisive for oral products |
| A 5% pod (≈50 mg/ml), all-day use | 9–11 mg | Ad libitum 5% pod peaks reached 33.1 ng/mL, above every pouch strength that has been measured |
| Nicotine-free or very low, by choice | Do not start | There is no version of this question where a non-user of nicotine has a reason to pick a strength |
Whatever you pick, pick low first. The pouch is still there in twenty minutes if it is too weak; if it is too strong you will know within five and the only remedy is taking it out. And be deliberate about the first one: a pouch is slower and longer than a vape, so judge it at the 30-minute mark, not at the two-minute mark when nothing much has happened yet. The first-strength guide covers the mechanics, and the complete mg guide covers how the numbers are arrived at in the first place.
The study that will answer this properly reports in 2029
I expected to write here that no trial had ever enrolled vapers and given them pouches. That stopped being true in September 2026.
NCT07829939, “Clinical Pharmacology of Oral Nicotine Pouches”, at the University of California, San Francisco, is a randomised crossover with two groups of twelve. Group 1 are smokers. “Group 2 (n=12) use nicotine-containing e-cigarettes regularly (use on 20 of past 30 days)”, and current regular pouch users are excluded. Participants spend four eight-hour days using 0, 3 and 6 mg pouches and, on one day, their own cigarettes or vape. The registered hypothesis is that “participants will adjust their intake of nicotine to be similar to or higher than that seen with cigarette smoking or vaping”.
It is the first registered study with a dedicated vaper arm receiving pouches, and the first whole-day repeated-dose design. Estimated primary completion: October 2029. Until then, every answer to this question — mine included — is inference from studies that recruited smokers.
One more sourced gap worth knowing about. NCT05030194 at Roswell Park measured ZYN and a Vuse e-cigarette in the same participants and completed on 25 January 2023. Its registry record shows no posted results and no registered publication. The one completed trial that put a pouch and a vape in the same mouths has published nothing in nearly four years.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a formula to convert mg/ml to mg per pouch?
No. Not from a regulator, not from a manufacturer, not from a study. Anyone presenting one has made it up. The reasons it cannot be done cleanly are real: how much of the bottle you get through is not a dose, puff behaviour alone shifts peak plasma nicotine by about a quarter on identical liquid, and pouch delivery does not track the number on the can.
Should I match my nicotine exactly when I switch?
Velo tells you to try, and then gives you nothing to do it with. My view is that exact matching is the wrong target anyway, because the time course is so different — 7 minutes to peak for a cigarette against 60 to 65 for a pouch. Aim to be in roughly the right neighbourhood and adjust by how you feel over a week.
Are nicotine pouches a way to quit vaping?
I am not going to tell you that, and no regulator has. NHS guidance states “Right now, Nicorette® QuickMist is the only approved NRT for quitting vaping.” FDA’s modified-risk order for ZYN, which I read in full, contains zero mentions of vaping, vapour, e-cigarettes or ENDS — its authorised claim is about using ZYN instead of cigarettes and nothing else. Swapping one nicotine product for another is not cessation, and nothing here is medical advice.
Will a pouch feel like a vape at the same strength?
No, and this trips up more switchers than the milligram figure does. The throat hit is absent, the onset is an hour rather than seconds, and the sensation under your lip is a burn from alkalinity rather than from inhaling. Expecting it to feel familiar is what leads people to go two tiers too strong in week one.
What if my e-liquid is a nicotine salt?
Then the mechanics are closer to a pouch than freebase is, but the literature does not agree on direction of effect. A human crossover found “The 0:100 conditions produced greater nicotine boost, longer puff duration, and larger puff volume compared to the 40:60 conditions” — more protonated nicotine, more uptake — while an industry-funded bench study reported the opposite for free-base absorption. The unsettled science is a second reason no conversion table should be trusted.
Sources
- Directive 2014/40/EU, recital 38 and Article 20(3), read from the UK’s archived consolidated copy at legislation.gov.uk/eudr/2014/40. This is the National Archives’ EU-exit mirror of the consolidated text, not EUR-Lex, which refuses automated requests.
- Tobacco and Related Products Regulations 2016, reg. 36 — the 20 mg/ml cap and the 2 ml tank limit. Note the instrument writes “20 milligrams per millilitre” and never “20 mg/ml”.
- 21 U.S.C. § 387g (US Code, 2024 edition) — no e-liquid concentration limit; the prohibition on reducing nicotine yields to zero.
- FDA, Nicotine Pouch Products Authorized by the FDA, content current 30 October 2026 — 67 products, three manufacturers, and the per-product strengths counted above.
- ClinicalTrials.gov API v2, query term “nicotine pouch”, 53 studies — eligibility criteria searched for e-liquid and mg/ml terms. Individual records: NCT07829939 (UCSF) and NCT05030194 (Roswell Park).
- Frosina J et al., “Assessing the impact of protonating acid combinations in e-cigarette liquids: a randomised, crossover study on nicotine pharmacokinetics”, PMC10310785 — Table 3 peak plasma nicotine figures. Funded by British American Tobacco; all authors industry employees.
- McEwan M et al., “A randomised study to investigate the nicotine pharmacokinetics of oral nicotine pouches and a combustible cigarette”, PMC8917032 — Table 2. Funded by British American Tobacco, manufacturer of two of the five products tested.
- Foulds J et al., “Development of a questionnaire for assessing dependence on electronic cigarettes among a large sample of ex-smoking e-cigarette users”, PMC4838001 — the e-liquid concentration dependence gradient. Funding statement not obtained; the PMC deposit is abstract-only.
- Nicotine form crossover: PMC13134460, NIDA- and FDA-funded. Bench comparison pointing the other way: PMC13083886, funded by a China Tobacco industrial subsidiary.
- FDA, modified risk tobacco product order for ZYN, 30 June 2026 — searched in full; no mention of vaping, vapour, e-cigarettes or ENDS.
- NHS, How to quit vaping and Vaping to quit smoking.
- Manufacturer pages, read 6 November 2026: Nordic Spirit, Velo’s nicotine strength guide, ZYN US FAQ.
- Last verified 6 November 2026.
