Breast cancer is the most common cancer diagnosed in women worldwide. About 1 in 8 women in the United States will develop invasive breast cancer over the course of her lifetime, and globally, an estimated 2.3 million women were diagnosed in 2022 alone. It was the most common cancer among women in 157 out of 185 countries that year.
Who Gets Diagnosed and at What Age
The median age at diagnosis for female breast cancer is 64, meaning half of all cases are found before that age and half after. The bulk of diagnoses cluster between ages 55 and 74, which together account for roughly 52% of all new cases. But breast cancer is not exclusively a disease of older women. Nearly 18% of cases occur in women between 45 and 54, and about 9% are diagnosed in women in their late 30s to mid-40s. Cases under age 35 are uncommon, making up about 2% of diagnoses, and breast cancer before age 20 is essentially nonexistent.
Men can also develop breast cancer, though it is rare. About 1 out of every 100 breast cancers diagnosed in the U.S. is found in a man, according to the CDC.
Rates Differ by Race and Ethnicity
Breast cancer does not affect all groups equally. Non-Hispanic White women have the highest overall incidence rate at roughly 187 per 100,000 women, though that rate has been slowly declining since the late 1990s. Non-Hispanic Black women are diagnosed at a rate of about 174 per 100,000, and their rate has remained essentially flat over the past two decades. Despite a slightly lower incidence, Black women have historically faced higher mortality from breast cancer, a gap driven largely by later-stage diagnoses and differences in access to care and treatment.
Hispanic women and Asian or Pacific Islander women are diagnosed at lower rates (134 and 144 per 100,000, respectively), but trends are moving in opposite directions. Hispanic incidence has been relatively stable, while rates among Asian and Pacific Islander women have been climbing steadily, increasing about 1.4% per year since the mid-2000s. That’s the fastest rise of any racial or ethnic group tracked by federal surveillance data.
Survival Rates by Stage
The prognosis for breast cancer depends heavily on how far it has spread at the time of diagnosis. For localized breast cancer, where the disease is still confined to the breast tissue, the five-year relative survival rate is 99.3%. When cancer has spread to nearby lymph nodes or surrounding tissue (regional stage), that figure drops to 86.3%. For distant or metastatic breast cancer, where the disease has reached other organs, the five-year survival rate is 31%.
An estimated 170,000 women in the U.S. are currently living with metastatic breast cancer. While metastatic disease remains incurable, advances in treatment have extended survival meaningfully over the past decade.
The Global Picture
Breast cancer is not just a high-income country problem. The World Health Organization estimated 2.3 million new diagnoses and 670,000 deaths from breast cancer worldwide in 2022. Incidence rates tend to be higher in wealthier nations, partly because of risk factors like later age at first pregnancy, lower rates of breastfeeding, and higher rates of hormone therapy use. But mortality is disproportionately concentrated in lower-income countries, where screening programs are limited and treatment is harder to access. In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, a larger share of breast cancers are diagnosed at advanced stages, which drives worse outcomes even for the same cancer biology.
What Drives the Numbers
Several factors contribute to breast cancer’s high incidence. Some are biological and unavoidable: being female, getting older, carrying inherited gene mutations (like BRCA1 or BRCA2), and having dense breast tissue all raise risk. Family history matters too, though most women diagnosed with breast cancer have no close relative with the disease.
Modifiable risk factors also play a role. Excess body weight after menopause, physical inactivity, alcohol consumption, and long-term use of combination hormone therapy are all linked to higher risk. On the other hand, the rise in screening mammography over the past few decades has also contributed to higher incidence numbers, not because more women are getting cancer, but because more early-stage cancers are being detected that might previously have gone unnoticed. Disentangling true increases in disease from increases in detection remains one of the trickier problems in cancer epidemiology.