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Does putting money on the line help you quit? What the trials say

A 2025 Cochrane review and three landmark trials on paying people to quit and putting your own money down: what they found, and what they don't prove.

Quitaro Team

5 min read

Yes, on the evidence. A 2025 Cochrane review of 48 studies found high-certainty evidence that financial incentives help people quit for six months or longer. Trials of putting your own money down are fewer: they suggest it helps the people who choose it, though most people decline.

Quitaro is not a medical device and does not diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any medical condition. Money on the line works alongside quit-smoking medicine and support, not instead of them.

What the Cochrane review found

Cochrane reviews pool every qualifying randomised trial on a question. Their 2025 update on incentives for smoking cessation included 48 studies in mixed populations, with more than 21,924 participants. The incentives included cash payments, vouchers and self-deposits.

Across 39 of those studies (18,303 participants), people offered incentives were more likely to have quit at six months or longer. The pooled risk ratio was 1.52 (95% CI 1.33 to 1.74), which the authors rate as high-certainty evidence. The effect held even after the incentives stopped (Notley et al., Cochrane, 2025).

In plain terms: across dozens of trials, putting money into the picture raised quit rates by about half compared with no incentive, and the effect lasted.

The authors also flag what is still open. They want more research on how cash rewards compare with “self-incentives (deposits)”, meaning people putting down their own money.

Paying people to quit: the workplace trial

In a trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 878 employees of a large US company were randomly assigned to receive either information about quit programmes or information plus up to $750 for completing a programme and staying quit. Each stage was confirmed by a biochemical test.

At 9–12 months, 14.7% of the incentive group had quit, against 5.0% of the information-only group. At 15–18 months, after the payments had ended, it was 9.4% against 3.6% (Volpp et al., NEJM, 2009).

Putting your own money down: the CARES trial

In the Philippines, researchers offered smokers a savings account called CARES. Smokers deposited their own money for six months, then took a urine test for nicotine and cotinine. If they passed, the savings stayed theirs; if they failed, the money went to charity.

Only 11% of the smokers offered CARES took it up. Even so, smokers randomly offered it were 3 percentage points more likely to pass the six-month test than the control group. The effect persisted in surprise tests at 12 months (Giné, Karlan & Zinman, 2010).

Rewards versus deposits, head to head

A second NEJM trial compared four incentive programmes among 2,538 CVS Caremark employees, their relatives and friends. Two programmes offered rewards of about $800. The other two asked participants to put down a $150 deposit of their own money, with $650 in rewards for those who succeeded.

The results:

  • Acceptance. 90.0% accepted a reward programme; only 13.7% accepted a deposit programme.
  • Overall. Every incentive programme beat usual care on six-month abstinence: 9.4–16.0% against 6.0%.
  • Rewards against deposits. Rewards produced higher overall quit rates than deposits (15.7% against 10.2%), mostly because far more people signed up.
  • People who would take either. Among the estimated 13.7% of people willing to accept either kind of programme, deposits produced a six-month quit rate 13.2 percentage points higher than rewards (95% CI 3.1 to 22.8).

(Halpern et al., NEJM, 2015)

What this means, and what it doesn’t

Three honest takeaways:

  1. Money tied to quitting is one of the best-evidenced behavioural tools there is. That rests on a high-certainty Cochrane finding across dozens of trials.
  2. Most people won’t choose to put their own money down. Those who do tend to do better with it than with rewards alone. A commitment works for the people who want one.
  3. No trial has tested Quitaro’s exact design. The trials above checked abstinence with breath or urine tests, and they mostly used rewards or deposits whose outcome depended on the test. Quitaro relies on your honest daily tap, and its money doesn’t depend on the result. We won’t claim the trials prove Quitaro works. What they show is that money and commitment genuinely move quit rates.

How Quitaro’s commitment works

  • You get 3 days free first.
  • Then you make one payment, equal to about a month of what you’d spend on cigarettes ($25–$150). Your cigarette money stops burning. It goes into your quit — and 70% of what Quitaro earns goes to the people fighting what you’re quitting.
  • Every day for 60 days, you tap Smoke-free today. A slip restarts the count from day one.
  • Hold 60 days and you earn the right to gift Quitaro to one invited friend, with no payment.
  • After that one payment: one payment, nothing more to pay, ever.

The full picture is on how it works and pricing. Why the check-in is a tap and not a test is covered in Can a quit-smoking app tell if you smoked?. Why the window is 60 days is in What the 66-day habit study actually says.

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