Roll-your-own cigarette
A roll-your-own 'cigarette, also called a handrolled cigarette, roll-up or rollie', is a cigarette made from loose tobacco and rolling paper. Factory-made cigarettes are called industrial or tailor-made cigarettes. U.S. federal law defines ‘roll-your-own tobacco’ as tobacco that, because of its appearance, type, packaging, or labeling, is suitable for use and likely to be offered to, or purchased by, consumers as tobacco for making cigarettes.
Rolling tobacco
Rolling tobacco, or cigarette tobacco, is the primary tobacco used for RYO cigarettes. It is generally packaged in pouches.After 2009, the United States federal tax rate on RYO tobacco was raised from $1.0969 per pound to $24.78 per pound. This increase has caused many people to switch to using pipe tobacco to make cigarettes, since the pipe tobacco tax rate was also increased, but only to $2.83 per pound.
A Tobacco Control analysis reported that after the U.S. federal tax disparity was created, retailers began offering cigarette rolling machines for consumers to use. The U.S. Government Accountability Office reported in 2025 that because pipe tobacco is taxed at a lower rate than roll-your-own tobacco, ‘consumers who hand roll cigarettes may have an incentive to use pipe tobacco’, and that manufacturers also had an incentive to relabel products as pipe tobacco.
In Australia, loose tobacco was taxed less than manufactured cigarettes until September 2016. Australia’s tax treatment of loose tobacco products such as roll-your-own tobacco is being aligned with the per-stick excise rate for manufactured cigarettes by progressively lowering the ‘equivalisation weight’ from 0.7 grams to 0.6 grams, with the new weight fully in effect from 1 September 2026.
In the United Kingdom, HM Revenue & Customs raised tobacco duty rates from 30 October 2024, applying the standard tobacco-duty escalator and increasing the duty rate for hand-rolling tobacco by an additional 10%. In January 2026, a Tobacco Control study discussed the UK affordability gap between hand-rolling tobacco and factory-made cigarettes and modelled scenarios for increasing hand-rolling tobacco duty to reduce that gap.
Ireland’s Budget 2026 increased tobacco excise, with the government reporting pro-rata increases applying to other tobacco products, including roll-your-own tobacco.
Cigarette rolling
Cigarette rolling may be done either by hand of with a. It should not be confused with .In Russia a special kind of self-rolled cigarette was in use, called "goat's leg". A paper was rolled in a cone, which was bent in half in the middle and the wider part was filled with tobacco. In a way, it resembled a tobacco pipe.