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What Cigars Actually Cost

Updated 2026-08-16 · by Eric

Every cigar carries three prices... the MSRP almost nobody pays, the street price you actually pay for a single online, and the sale price that shows up whenever a retailer wants the shelf space back.

The three prices

MSRP. The manufacturer's suggested retail price, and "suggested" is doing most of the work in that phrase. The brand sets it, no law enforces it, and on plenty of lines it functions as a starting anchor rather than a price. Some MSRPs sit close to reality. Others are set high on purpose so a standing discount has something to be a discount from.

Street price. What one cigar costs from a normal online retailer on a normal Tuesday... no code, no clearance, no closeout. This is the real number, and it is the number every verdict here is judged against. A cigar is rated at what you would pay for it, not at what the reviewer paid, which is why how a WSA review works puts the source badge and the street price side by side.

Sale price. Temporary by definition. Sometimes a genuine event... end of allocation, a retailer clearing a slow SKU... and sometimes just the resting state of a brand that prices itself to be marked down.

What is inside the number

Leaf comes first, and it is the part with the longest lead time. Tobacco is grown, cured, fermented, and then aged for months or years before anything gets rolled, and all of that is money sitting in a warehouse doing nothing visible. Then labor: a handmade cigar is bunched and rolled by a person, and handmade versus machine-made is the single biggest input-cost split in the category. Then freight, and climate-controlled storage on both ends, because tobacco that dries out in transit is scrap.

Then the taxes. The federal excise tax on large cigars... anything weighing more than 3 pounds per thousand, which covers essentially every cigar you would ever buy in a shop... is 52.75 percent of the price the manufacturer or importer sells it for, capped at 40.26 cents per cigar. That cap matters more than the percentage. Do the division and the cap starts binding at a first-sale price of roughly 76 cents, which every handmade cigar clears easily. A $5 cigar and a $30 cigar pay the same federal tax. Then state tobacco tax lands on top, and that one varies wildly by where you live.

After that, margin. A distributor takes a cut, the retailer takes a cut, and a brick-and-mortar shop takes a larger one than a warehouse in another state does, because it is paying for a lounge you are sitting in.

Why the box math is better

Boxes are cheaper per stick because they are cheaper to handle. One box is one pick, one pack, one label, one shipment. Twenty singles is twenty picks out of twenty open boxes, and open boxes are inventory the retailer now has to sell one stick at a time. The single price carries that cost.

How much cheaper is not a fixed number, and anyone who quotes you one is guessing. On some lines the per-stick box price undercuts the single badly. On others the five-pack lands within pennies of the box and the "save $149" banner is measured against an MSRP nobody was charging. Divide the box price by the box count yourself and compare it to the single. That one piece of arithmetic is most of what buying cigars well amounts to.

Brands that never discount

Padrón and Fuente hold their pricing tight, and the reviews here reflect it... the Padrón 2000 Maduro Robusto has sat near $9 without moving, and the note in that review is that it is never on sale. Tight pricing usually means some combination of a minimum advertised price policy, allocated supply, and demand that does not need help. The cigar sells at the number, so the number stands.

The reverse tells you more. A cigar that is 30 percent off every day of the year does not have an MSRP that got discounted. It has an MSRP that was never operative. The sale price is the price, and the crossed-out figure is set dressing. That is worth knowing before you treat a discount as a signal of value, which is the whole argument in when a sale changes the math.

The $100 cigar

Triple-digit cigars exist, and some of what is in them is real: long-aged tobacco, tiny production runs, wrapper leaf that took years to get right. The rest is positioning. Above a certain point the price stops describing the contents and starts describing the shelf the brand wants to be on... a number high enough that the box itself is the message. Rarity gets priced, packaging gets priced, and the name gets priced hardest of all.

None of which makes an expensive cigar bad. It just means the price is not evidence.

Price and verdict do not track

One of the most expensive cigars reviewed on this site is the Davidoff Winston Churchill The Late Hour Toro at roughly $29.50, and it earned Hand-Me-One (2/4). A Perdomo Double Aged 12 Year Maduro Epicure at roughly $12.50 earned Box Buy (4/4). Same reviewer, same method, same tasting approach... a 2.4x price difference running the wrong direction.

It goes the other way too. The Padrón 1926 Serie 40th Anniversary Maduro at about $32 is a genuinely excellent cigar that landed at Five-Pack (3/4) partly because of the price, since a verdict at street price has to answer whether the cigar is worth its own number. Cost is not quality. Cost is one variable the verdict has to survive.

On the site

The Davidoff Winston Churchill The Late Hour Toro took Hand-Me-One (2/4) at roughly $29.50 while the Perdomo Double Aged 12 Year Maduro Epicure took Box Buy (4/4) at roughly $12.50. The American Viking The Filthy Viking Toro is the clearest case of price moving a verdict: Five-Pack (3/4) at its $11.44 street price, and a box buy if you catch it 20 to 25 percent off.

Keep reading

• When a sale changes the math
• How to buy cigars
• State tobacco taxes and why your cigars cost more than his
• How to read a WSA review

Reviewed at WSA since this page was written