Sept. 23, 2025 (New York)—Vital Strategies today released the “Health Taxes Action Guide: A Road Map for Policymakers”—a comprehensive toolkit to help governments implement effective health taxes on harmful products such as tobacco, alcohol and sugar-sweetened beverages. Designed for health policymakers, the guide details a step-by-step approach to draft, pass and defend health taxes to confront rising rates of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) worldwide.
NCDs—chronic conditions such as heart disease, cancer and Type 2 diabetes—claim 43 million lives each year. This growing toll, combined with shrinking global development assistance, tightened domestic budgets and persistent humanitarian crises, has left today’s health care infrastructure ill-equipped to address these illnesses. Health taxes are a powerful and underutilized tool to address the systemic drivers of NCDs. A 50% price increase on tobacco, alcohol and sugar-sweetened beverages could save 50 million lives in 50 years and raise over $20 trillion in additional revenue.
“Health taxes deliver a triple win: They save lives and prevent disease by reducing consumption of harmful products, generate sustainable domestic revenue, and decrease long-term health system costs,” said Dr. Mary-Ann Etiebet, CEO and President of Vital Strategies. “Our new action guide distills years of global experience into a practical road map for policymakers—equipping them with the tools they need to advocate for and implement fiscal measures to secure a healthier future.”
The Health Taxes Action Guide outlines key steps for designing and implementing effective and resilient health taxes:
- Understanding the Policy Pathway: Strengthen the efficacy of existing taxes or implement new ones by applying proven strategies like changing tax structures, increasing rates and indexing to inflation.
- Making the Health Case on Harmful Products: Equip health policymakers to generate robust data and present credible evidence demonstrating the true burden of NCDs.
- Turning Evidence Into Action: Usedata modeling to estimate tax revenue, health impacts and productivity gains and illustrate the cost of inaction.
- Anticipating Industry Opposition: Recognize and deftly respond to common tactics used by tobacco, alcohol, and food and beverage industries.
- Strategic Communication: Produce evidence, strengthen credibility, build public support, frame the narrative and leverage positive impacts, turning data into political and public action.
- Safeguarding Health Objectives When Drafting Policies: Draft tax legislationthat is effective, enforceable, and able to withstand political or legal challenges.
- Building Alliances and Engaging Civil Society: Collaborate with policymakers, researchers, parliamentarians and civil society to build credibility, amplify advocacy and protect reforms.
By following these steps, policymakers can produce well-designed health taxes that are strategically aligned with national health and development goals, equitable in protecting youth and low-income people, sustainable with safeguards against inflation and industry interference, and effective in reducing consumption of unhealthy products and saving lives.
Vital Strategies has supported health tax reforms in more than 40 countries around the world. Leveraging cross-cutting expertise in public health, economics, legal and tax policy, advocacy, and strategic communication, the guide adapts global best practices so that policymakers can take decisive fiscal action to combat NCDs.
This action guide also builds on insights from “The Future of Health Financing in Africa: The Role of Health Taxes” brief, co-authored by Vital Strategies, the Economics for Health team at Johns Hopkins University, and the Research Unit on the Economics of Excisable Products at the University of Cape Town.
The launch of the Health Taxes Action Guide comes just ahead of the Fourth UN High-Level Meeting on NCDs, where global leaders will review commitments to addressing these preventable diseases. Vital Strategies is calling on governments, policymakers and other institutions at global, national and municipal levels to build public health systems of the future that can effectively and sustainably tackle the growing burden of NCDs.
Read the full guide here: https://www.vitalstrategies.org/resources/health-taxes-action-guide/
For more information on Vital Strategies’ work on health taxes, please visit: https://www.vitalstrategies.org/healthtaxes
About Vital Strategies
Vital Strategies believes every person should be protected by an equitable and effective public health system. We partner with governments, communities, and organizations around the world to reimagine public health so that health is supported in all the places we live, work, and play. The result is millions of people living longer, healthier lives.
To learn more, visit vitalstrategies.org, or follow us on LinkedIn.