HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the United States, and the numbers reflect that. More than 42 million Americans currently have an HPV type known to cause disease, and about 13 million new infections occur every year. Over a lifetime, more than 90% of sexually active men and 80% of sexually active women will be infected with HPV at some point.
How Common HPV Is Right Now
National survey data from the CDC paint a striking picture of just how widespread HPV is among U.S. adults. Among people aged 18 to 59, about 42.5% had at least one type of genital HPV. That breaks down to 45.2% of men and 39.9% of women. In other words, nearly half of all adults in that age range are carrying a genital HPV infection at any given time.
Not all of those infections carry the same risk. About 22.7% of adults had a “high-risk” type, the kind linked to cancer. Men were slightly more likely to carry high-risk strains (25.1%) than women (20.4%). Oral HPV is far less common, showing up in about 7.3% of adults, though men are roughly three times more likely to have it than women (11.5% vs. 3.3%).
Why the Lifetime Risk Is So High
HPV spreads through skin-to-skin contact during sexual activity, including vaginal, anal, and oral sex. Condoms reduce the risk but don’t eliminate it, because the virus can live on skin that a condom doesn’t cover. This is a big reason the lifetime infection rate is so high: if you’re sexually active at all, exposure is nearly inevitable over the course of years and multiple partners.
The good news is that most HPV infections are temporary. The immune system clears the majority of them without the person ever knowing they were infected. About two-thirds of high-risk infections clear within a year, and roughly 90% resolve within two years. The infections that don’t clear on their own are the ones that can eventually lead to cell changes and, in some cases, cancer.
High-Risk vs. Low-Risk Types
There are more than 200 types of HPV, and about 40 infect the genital and oral areas. They fall into two broad categories based on what they can do to your cells.
- Low-risk types (especially types 6 and 11) cause genital warts and other benign growths. More than 90% of genital wart cases trace back to these two types. They’re annoying and sometimes persistent, but they don’t lead to cancer.
- High-risk types (especially types 16 and 18) can trigger cell changes that, if left unchecked for years, develop into cancer. These high-risk strains are detected in 99% of cervical precancers.
Many people carry both categories simultaneously and never develop symptoms from either. The distinction matters mostly for screening: routine cervical cancer screening specifically looks for high-risk types because those are the ones that require monitoring.
How Many Cancers HPV Causes
While most HPV infections clear harmlessly, the small percentage that persist can have serious consequences. In the U.S., HPV causes an estimated 36,000 cancer cases per year across several sites in the body.
Throat and mouth cancers (specifically oropharyngeal cancers) are now the largest category, with about 16,000 cases per year attributed to HPV. Cervical cancer accounts for roughly 11,100 HPV-caused cases annually, and anal cancer adds another 7,600. HPV also contributes to cancers of the vulva, vagina, and penis in smaller numbers.
Globally, HPV caused an estimated 620,000 new cancer cases in women and 70,000 in men in 2019. Cervical cancer alone killed around 350,000 women worldwide in 2022, with the heaviest burden falling on low- and middle-income countries. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest cervical HPV prevalence among women at 24%, followed by Latin America and the Caribbean at 16%.
Vaccination Is Changing the Numbers
The HPV vaccine, introduced in 2006, targets the types responsible for most HPV-related cancers and genital warts. Its impact on infection rates has been dramatic. Among girls and young women aged 14 to 19, infections with vaccine-targeted HPV types dropped 88%, falling from 11.5% before the vaccine era to just 1.1% by 2015-2018. Among women aged 20 to 24, the decline was 81%, from 18.5% down to 3.3%.
These reductions are especially notable because vaccination coverage in the U.S. has never reached the levels seen in countries like Australia or the U.K., where rates of HPV-related disease have fallen even more sharply. The vaccine is recommended for everyone through age 26 and is most effective when given before any sexual exposure to the virus, which is why it’s routinely offered at ages 11 to 12. Adults between 27 and 45 can also get vaccinated after discussing it with their doctor, though the benefit is smaller since most people in that range have already been exposed to at least some HPV types.
Even with vaccination reshaping the landscape, HPV remains extraordinarily common among unvaccinated populations. The virus circulates so widely that for most sexually active adults, the relevant question isn’t whether they’ve been exposed, but whether their immune system cleared it, which in the vast majority of cases, it does.