Roughly 9.7 million people die of cancer worldwide each year, based on the most recent global estimates from 2022. In the United States alone, an projected 618,120 cancer deaths are expected in 2025. That makes cancer the second leading cause of death globally, behind only cardiovascular disease.
Which Cancers Kill the Most People
Lung cancer is by far the deadliest, responsible for 1.82 million deaths worldwide in 2022. Colorectal cancer follows at 904,000 deaths, then liver cancer at 760,000, breast cancer at 666,000, and stomach cancer at 660,000. Together, these five cancers account for roughly half of all cancer deaths on the planet.
Lung cancer’s dominance on this list reflects both how common it is and how difficult it is to catch early. Many lung cancers are diagnosed at an advanced stage, when treatment options are more limited. By contrast, breast cancer is diagnosed more frequently than liver or stomach cancer but kills fewer people because screening catches many cases early, when survival rates are high.
Cancer Deaths in the United States
The U.S. projects about 618,120 cancer deaths in 2025, alongside roughly 2 million new diagnoses. Despite those large numbers, the overall cancer death rate has been falling steadily since the early 1990s. Between 2019 and 2023, the all-cancer death rate dropped by an average of 1.5% per year. That consistent decline adds up: over three decades, it has prevented millions of deaths that would have occurred at the old rates.
The drop is driven largely by reductions in the four most common cancer killers. Lung cancer deaths have fallen sharply as smoking rates declined. Colorectal cancer deaths have dropped thanks to wider screening. Breast and prostate cancer deaths have decreased with better detection and treatment. These gains continue across all major racial and ethnic groups, though not equally.
How Income and Race Affect Cancer Survival
Cancer does not kill evenly across populations. In the U.S., Black Americans have significantly higher overall cancer mortality than white Americans, a disparity that emerged in the 1960s and persists today. Black men face more than twice the risk of dying from prostate cancer compared to non-Hispanic white men. Asian/Pacific Islander and Hispanic populations, on the other hand, have lower overall cancer death rates than non-Hispanic whites.
Income and education create even steeper gaps for certain cancers. Men living below the poverty line have 80% higher cancer mortality than men with incomes at six times the poverty level or above. Women with less than a high school education face 6.3 times the cervical cancer death rate of college-educated women. For lung cancer, men with the least education die at 2.6 times the rate of the most educated. These patterns reflect differences in smoking rates, access to screening, insurance coverage, and proximity to quality treatment centers.
The Gap Between Rich and Poor Countries
Where you live in the world shapes your odds of surviving cancer dramatically. Wealthier nations diagnose more cancers overall, partly because they screen more people. But poorer countries have disproportionately high death rates relative to the number of cases they find. For breast cancer, the case fatality rate in low- and middle-income countries is roughly 48%, four times the rate in high-income nations. The reason is straightforward: delayed diagnosis and limited access to treatment.
China drives a large share of global cancer deaths simply due to population size, contributing roughly 2.9 million cancer deaths annually. Countries with high development indexes actually bear the greatest absolute burden of cancer deaths globally, though the mortality rates per person are broadly similar across development levels. The cancers that kill differ by region too. Stomach and liver cancers cause a much larger share of deaths in parts of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, while breast and colorectal cancers dominate in Western countries.
Nearly Half of Cancer Deaths Are Preventable
An estimated 44% of all cancer deaths among U.S. adults 30 and older are linked to modifiable risk factors. That translates to roughly 262,000 deaths per year that are, in principle, avoidable.
Cigarette smoking is the single largest contributor, responsible for about 28.5% of all cancer deaths. That means smoking alone kills more cancer patients than any risk factor other than cancer itself. Excess body weight comes second, contributing to 7.3% of cancer deaths, followed by alcohol consumption at 4.1%. The remaining share comes from a mix of factors: physical inactivity, poor diet (low fiber, low fruit and vegetable intake, high red and processed meat consumption), ultraviolet radiation exposure, secondhand smoke, and seven types of cancer-causing infections.
These numbers underscore a counterintuitive reality: while cancer can feel random and uncontrollable, the largest single cause of cancer death is a behavior that people can change. Tobacco control has already driven much of the decline in cancer mortality over the past 30 years, and continued reductions in smoking, obesity, and alcohol use would push those numbers further down.