Introduction:
Aim: While smoke-free policies in Europe are well-established for public places, private settings are mainly not regulated and are thus an important source of second-hand smoke exposure. We aimed to describe and characterise smoking rules in homes and cars of smokers from 6 European countries.

Methods:
We used baseline data (2016) of the International Tobacco Control 6 European (ITC 6E Country Survey) under the EUREST-PLUS Project and part of the larger ITC Project, conducted in national representative samples of 1,000 adult smokers aged ≥18 per country in Germany, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Spain. We analysed information about smoking rules in their homes and their cars with children, including: no rules, partial rules, and total ban. We described and compared weighted prevalence of smoking rules by country and several sociodemographic (sex, age, education, partner’s smoking status, having children) and smoking characteristics (cigarettes smoked daily, dependence) using prevalence ratios (PR) with 95% confidence intervals (95%CI) from logistic regression analyses.

Results:
In homes, 71.2% of smokers had some type of smoking ban: 26.5% had total bans (from 13.1% in Spain to 35.5% in Hungary) and 44.7% had partial bans (from 41.3% in Spain to 49.9% in Greece). Overall, prevalence of total ban in cars with children was 60.9% (from 51.8% in Greece to 67.7% in Germany). The characteristics associated with not restricting smoking in homes and cars included: low education (PR=1.51; 95%CI:1.20-1.90 and PR=1.55; 95%CI:1.09-2.20), smoking >30 cigarettes daily (PR=1.53; 95%CI:1.10-2.14 and PR=2.66; 95%CI:1.40-5.05) and no attempts to quit ever (PR=1.18; 95%CI:1.06-1.31 and PR=1.28; 95%CI:1.06-1.54).

Conclusions:
Most European smokers opt for partial smoking ban in homes and total smoking ban in cars with children. Prevalence of total bans in their homes is relatively low. Further education and policy initiatives are necessary to reduce this important public health threat.

Funding:
The EUREST-PLUS Study takes place with the financial support of the European Commission, Horizon 2020 HCO-6-2015 program (EUREST-PLUS: 681109; C. Vardavas) and the University of Waterloo (GT. Fong). Additional support was provided to the University of Waterloo by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (FDN-148477). GT. Fong was supported by a Senior Investigator Grant from the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research.