VAPEBENCH

Menthol Vapes: The Six That Are Actually Authorized

Every menthol vape the FDA has authorized fits on one page: six products from two companies. Here is that list, and what it does and does not mean.

WARNING: This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

Most articles about menthol vapes rank twenty or thirty products. There is a shorter and more useful list available, and it comes from the FDA: six menthol products, from two companies.

That is the complete set of menthol e-cigarettes that may be lawfully marketed in the United States. It is not our ranking and it is not our opinion — it is a one-page document the agency publishes and updates.

The list

From E-Cigarettes Authorized by the FDA, last updated March 2026. The document’s own subtitle is blunt: “These are the only e-cigarettes that may be lawfully sold in the United States.” The menthol entries on it are:

JUUL Labs Inc.

NJOY LLC

Everything else on that page is tobacco-flavoured — Virginia Tobacco, Rich Tobacco, Classic Tobacco, Golden Tobacco, Blonde Tobacco. Menthol is the only non-tobacco flavour category on the list at all.

How the list got here

Two decisions produced it.

On 21 June 2024, the FDA issued marketing granted orders for NJOY’s four menthol products. The agency’s own framing: “Today’s authorizations mark the first non-tobacco flavored e-cigarette products to be authorized by the FDA.” Before that date, every authorized e-cigarette in the country was tobacco-flavoured.

On 17 July 2025, the FDA authorized five JUUL products — the device, Virginia Tobacco pods at 3% and 5%, and Menthol pods at 3% and 5%.

Menthol has not been a formality in the other direction either. The FDA issued marketing denial orders to R.J. Reynolds Vapor Company for six flavoured Vuse Alto products, three of them menthol. Applications get refused, and menthol applications have been refused.

What is not on the list

This is the part that matters if you are standing in a shop.

None of the high-capacity flavoured disposables that dominate US shelves appear on the FDA’s authorized list — not the large-format brands, not their menthol or ice variants. The list is one page long and they are not on it.

The FDA is direct about what that means for sellers: those “manufacturing, importing, selling, or distributing e-cigarettes without the required premarket authorization risk enforcement.”

Two honest qualifications, because the distinction gets blurred constantly:

What you can take from it is narrower and still useful: if you specifically want a menthol product that has cleared FDA premarket review, the set of options is six, and you now know their names.

What authorization does not mean

The FDA says this itself, on every one of these announcements, and it is worth repeating in the agency’s words rather than ours:

While these products are authorized to be sold in the United States, it does not mean these products are safe, nor are they “FDA approved.” All tobacco products are harmful and potentially addictive. Those who do not use tobacco products shouldn’t start.

Authorization is a finding that marketing a specific product is appropriate for the protection of public health, given the population of people who already use tobacco. It is not a safety rating, and it is not a comparison between the six products above.

Nicotine strength across the six

The authorized menthol products span a wider range than the shelf does. JUUL menthol comes at 3% and 5%; NJOY at 2.4%, 4.5%, 5% and 6%.

That range is worth noticing because the disposable market has effectively standardised on 5%, which means “strength” is rarely a choice you get to make. Here it is. If you have been looking for something below 5% menthol, two of the six are, and that is a real difference in delivered nicotine per puff rather than a marketing gradient.

Concentration is only half of total nicotine, though — the other half is how much liquid the device holds. A 2.4% pod system and a 5% disposable holding several times the liquid are not comparable on the percentage alone. That arithmetic, and what the same FDA list says about the top of the range, is in strongest nicotine vapes.

State rules are a separate question

Federal authorization is not the only filter on what you can buy. States and cities run their own flavour restrictions, and several states maintain directories that only permit products which have filed with the FDA. Those rules operate independently of the authorized list — a product can be federally authorized and still restricted where you live, and the reverse situation is common too.

We covered how the state directory rules and the shipping restrictions interact in buying vapes online in the US. If you are trying to work out what is available to you specifically, that is the more useful piece.

Why there is no ranking on this page

We have not tested any of these products, so there are no scores here. The audit that runs on every build blocks published scores for anything we have not measured, and a menthol ranking would require actually tasting them — which is not something we can fake with a spec sheet.

A ranking is also the less interesting document in this particular case. The constraint on menthol in the US is not which one tastes best among thirty; it is that the lawfully marketed set has six members and most published lists do not mention this at all.

How we test

Product test results have not yet been published. Future reports will separate manufacturer specifications from observations, preserve raw readings, identify the tester and sample source, and state the limits of any estimate. The protocol is documented in our testing method.

Sources: E-Cigarettes Authorized by the FDA (March 2026) · FDA Authorizes Marketing of Four Menthol-Flavored E-Cigarette Products (21 June 2024) · FDA Authorizes Marketing of Tobacco- and Menthol-Flavored JUUL E-Cigarette Products (17 July 2025)