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- Why People Start Smoking and Why It’s Hard to Stop
- Reasons to Quit Smoking
- Health Benefits of Quitting Smoking Over Time
- Benefits of Quitting Tobacco If You Have Cancer
- Planning Your Quit Day
- Quitting Smoking or Smokeless Tobacco
- Quitting E-cigarettes (Vapes, Vape Pens)
- Nicotine Replacement Therapy
- Prescription Medicines to Help You Quit Tobacco
- Dealing with the Mental Part of Tobacco Addiction
- Are There Other Ways to Quit Tobacco?
- Staying Tobacco-free After You Quit
- Help for Cravings and Tough Situations
- Talking With Your Cancer Care Team About Tobacco Use
- How to Help Someone Quit Smoking
- Harmful Chemicals in Tobacco Products
- Is Any Type of Tobacco Product Safe?
- Keeping Your Children Tobacco-free
- Empowered to Quit
- Health Risks of Smoking Tobacco
- Health Risks of Smokeless Tobacco
- Health Risks of Secondhand Smoke
- ACS CancerRisk360
Lifetime Risk of Developing or Dying From Cancer
The lifetime risk of developing or dying from cancer refers to the chance a person has, over the course of their lifetime (from birth to death), of being diagnosed with or dying from cancer. These risk estimates are one way to measure how widespread cancer is in the United States.
The following tables list lifetime risks of developing and dying from certain cancers for men and women in the United States. The information is from the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database, and is based on incidence data from 2017 through 2019 and mortality data from 2018 through 2020 in the US, the most recent years for which data are available.
The risk is expressed both in terms of a percentage and as odds.
- For example, the risk that a man will develop cancer of the pancreas during his lifetime is 1.7%. This means he has about 1 chance in 58 of developing pancreatic cancer (100/1.7 = 58).
- Put another way, 1 out of every 58 men in the United States will develop pancreatic cancer during his lifetime.
These numbers are average risks for the overall US population. Your risk may be higher or lower than these numbers, depending on your particular risk factors for each type of cancer.
Males
Risk of developing | Risk of dying from | |||
% | 1 in | % | 1 in | |
Any cancer | 41.6 | 2 | 19 | 5 |
Bladder (includes in situ) | 3.6 | 28 | 0.8 | 119 |
Brain and nervous system | 0.7 | 145 | 0.5 | 192 |
Breast | 0.1 | 726 | <0.1 | 3,476 |
Colon and rectum | 4.3 | 23 | 1.6 | 61 |
Esophagus | 0.8 | 127 | 0.7 | 144 |
Hodgkin lymphoma | 0.2 | 431 | <0.1 | 2,956 |
Kidney and renal pelvis | 2.3 | 43 | 0.5 | 183 |
Larynx (voice box) | 0.5 | 197 | 0.2 | 594 |
Leukemia | 1.9 | 53 | 0.9 | 115 |
Liver and bile duct | 1.5 | 65 | 1.0 | 100 |
Lung and bronchus | 6.3 | 16 | 4.4 | 23 |
Melanoma of the skin* | 3.6 | 28 | 0.4 | 248 |
Multiple myeloma | 1.0 | 103 | 0.4 | 232 |
Non-Hodgkin lymphoma | 2.4 | 42 | 0.7 | 136 |
Oral cavity and pharynx | 1.7 | 59 | 0.4 | 248 |
Pancreas | 1.7 | 58 | 1.4 | 74 |
Prostate | 12.9 | 8 | 2.3 | 44 |
Stomach | 1.0 | 101 | 0.4 | 260 |
Testicles | 0.4 | 244 | <0.1 | 4,889 |
Thyroid | 0.7 | 153 | 0.1 | 1,780 |
Females
Risk of developing | Risk of dying from | ||||
% | 1 in | % | 1 in | ||
Any cancer | 39.6 | 3 | 17 | 6 | |
Bladder (includes in situ) | 1.1 | 89 | 0.3 | 311 | |
Brain and nervous system | 0.5 | 186 | 0.4 | 243 | |
Breast | 13 | 8 | 2.5 | 41 | |
Cervix | 0.7 | 152 | 0.2 | 473 | |
Colon and rectum | 3.9 | 25 | 1.5 | 67 | |
Esophagus | 0.2 | 434 | 0.2 | 536 | |
Hodgkin lymphoma | 0.2 | 527 | <0.1 | 4,071 | |
Kidney and renal pelvis | 1.4 | 73 | 0.3 | 330 | |
Larynx (voice box) | 0.1 | 844 | <0.1 | 2,416 | |
Leukemia | 1.3 | 75 | 0.6 | 159 | |
Liver and bile duct | 0.7 | 143 | 0.5 | 182 | |
Lung and bronchus | 5.9 | 17 | 3.8 | 26 | |
Melanoma of the skin* | 2.5 | 41 | 0.2 | 473 | |
Multiple myeloma | 0.8 | 131 | 0.4 | 284 | |
Non-Hodgkin lymphoma | 1.9 | 52 | 0.6 | 176 | |
Oral cavity and pharynx | 0.7 | 139 | 0.2 | 541 | |
Ovary | 1.1 | 87 | 0.8 | 130 | |
Pancreas | 1.7 | 60 | 1.3 | 74 | |
Stomach | 0.6 | 155 | 0.3 | 371 | |
Thyroid | 1.7 | 58 | 0.1 | 1,467 | |
Uterus | 3.1 | 32 | 0.7 | 153 | |
*The risk numbers for melanoma are for non-Hispanic White individuals. The risk among people of other races/ethnicities is likely to be lower.
The American Cancer Society medical and editorial content team
Our team is made up of doctors and oncology certified nurses with deep knowledge of cancer care as well as editors and translators with extensive experience in medical writing.
American Cancer Society. Lifetime Probability of Developing (2017-2019) or Dying (2018-2020) from Cancer (Cancer Facts & Figures 2024 Supplemental Data). 2024. Accessed at https://www.cancer.org/content/dam/cancer-org/research/cancer-facts-and-statistics/annual-cancer-facts-and-figures/2024/sd4-lifetime-probability-2024.pdf on January 18, 2024.
Last Revised: January 18, 2024
American Cancer Society medical information is copyrighted material. For reprint requests, please see our Content Usage Policy.
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