Cash rewards help folks quit smoking
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Fat stacks of cash can provide powerful motivation to quit smoking, a new study says. Twice as many smokers quit when offered cash rewards of up to $600, researchers report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
"These participants had smoked for decades and likely made multiple unsuccessful quit attempts in the past," said senior researcher Dr. Scott Halpern, director of the Palliative and Advanced Illness Research Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
"We found that adding financial incentives increased quit rates in a population that can be especially difficult to reach with traditional smoking cessation approaches," Halpern said in a news release.
For the new study, researchers tested cash rewards against three other smoking cessation strategies among more than 3,200 active smokers who'd been referred for lung cancer screening.
Participants in the incentive program could earn up to $600 if their blood or urine samples proved they were nicotine-free—$100 at two weeks, $200 at three months and $300 at six months.
These patients were also offered free smoking cessation medications.
The other strategies included standard care that simply referred patients to community or health care smoking cessation resources; standard care plus free quit-smoking medications; or standard care plus free meds and access to text-based support.
Smokers were randomly assigned to one of the four groups and then followed for a half-year.
After six months, results showed that cold hard cash helped more than either free meds or text-based support.
About 8% of people receiving financial incentives plus free medication had quit smoking, more than double the 3% who quit under standard care advice and referrals. Only 1% had quit with free meds, and 2% with free meds and text-based support.
Researchers next plan to look at how to best implement quit-smoking programs fueled by cash incentives and to study how the general public might respond to the notion of paying people to quit smoking.
"Finding new approaches that help people successfully stop smoking can have an enormous impact, not only on their health but also on their quality of life," lead researcher Dr. Joanna Hart, an assistant professor of pulmonary, allergy and critical care at Penn Medicine, said in a news release.
Publication details
Joanna L. Hart et al, Smoking Cessation Among Underserved Patients Referred for Lung Cancer Screening, JAMA (2026). DOI: 10.1001/jama.2026.17192
Journal information: Journal of the American Medical Association
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