Current ISO smoking standards limit the maximum quantity of Total Particulate Matter (TPM) that should be trapped on a 44 mm Cambridge Filter Pad (CFP) to 150 mg. When smoke methods were first developed in the 1950s, cigarettes had smoke yields much higher than those commonly available today. A consequence of this was that to produce a TPM yield of 150 mg, at a rate of about 8 puffs per cigarette, required approximately 40 puffs using only five cigarettes. Nowadays products have much lower yields and for 150 mg of TPM to be collected using, e.g. a 1 mg/cig product, approximately 1000 puffs may have to be taken. In addition, new more intense smoking regimes, e.g. Health Canada Intense, have been adopted and these are known to generate significantly more water, which may also affect pad integrity. To characterise the trapping efficiency of the CFP with contemporary cigarettes, an investigation has been conducted to examine the capability of 44 mm CFPs to trap quantities of smoke up to and beyond the ISO standard limit. Incremental numbers of 1R5F and 3R4F University of Kentucky reference cigarettes were smoked onto separate 44 mm CFPs to obtain a range of TPM from approximately 50 to 400 mg/pad. The range of the number of puffs taken for 1R5F and 3R4F were 160 to 1300 and 40 to 320 respectively. Nicotine, water, TPM, nicotine free dry particulate matter (NFDPM) and carbon monoxide (CO) were measured. A comparison of the results was made between TPM up to the ISO limit of 150 mg/pad and those up to approximately 400 mg/pad. Under ISO regime smoking, the trapping efficiency of the pad was found to be constant up to 150 mg/pad. When the ISO limit was exceeded, the yields per cigarette of TPM, nicotine and water were found to slightly reduce. The reduction begins to appear around 220 mg per pad. In addition, the deviation from the standard ISO yield was greater for the ventilated, lower yielding 1R5F cigarette than that of the 3R4F product. However, the ratios of CO and NFDPM to TPM did not appear to have been compromised when the ISO limit was exceeded. A further observation was the pressure drop (PD) of CFPs increasing slightly as the TPM reached 400 mg, however this was well below the 0.9 KPa recommended by ISO. In conclusion, this work has shown that, with contemporary cigarettes during ISO regime smoking, the CFP retains its integrity up to the current ISO standard and beyond. However, there is a small reduction in the yield of some smoke analytes when the ISO TPM limit is exceeded on a 44 mm CFP. Further work is needed to clarify whether the composition of this reduced yield TPM changes above 150 mg/pad during ISO smoking and whether the 44 mm pad behaves in a similar manner under the Health Canada Intense smoking regime.