How cancer survival rates have changed since 1975
Nobody talks about cancer survival rates the way they talk about, say, the stock market. The numbers change slowly, over decades, and the people most affected are often too busy dealing with the disease to track the data.
The American Cancer Society has been publishing these numbers since 1975 and most people never look. For those who do find something, the summary number (overall survival rising from 49% to 69% over 50 years) doesn’t quite capture it on its own.
That’s from the 2025 Cancer Facts and Figures report, five-year relative survival rates, 1975 to 2020.
Where medicine changed everything
In 1975, leukemia had a 34% five-year survival rate. By 2020 it was 67%. That is not the same disease, functionally. Neither is myeloma, which went from 25% to 61%, or Non-Hodgkin lymphoma at 47% to 74%, or liver cancer, which was 3% in 1975 and reached 22% by 2020. What happened in between was targeted therapy, immunotherapy and detection finding cases earlier than the 1970s had any mechanism to find them. Lung cancer went from 12% to 27%, still the leading cause of cancer death. Nobody who looked at lung cancer in 1975 would have predicted 27%.
Where progress stalled or reversed
This part doesn’t make it into many headlines. Larynx cancer survival dropped from 66% to 62% over fifty years. Uterine corpus cancer fell from 87% to 81%. Cervical cancer decreased from 69% to 67%. These are types of cancer with established screening protocols and early detection methods, yet survival rates declined anyway. Worth asking why. Worth asking louder than most people currently are.
The racial gap that didn’t close
Black patients in 1975 had a 39% five-year survival rate across all cancers. White patients had 50%. By 2020: 65% and 70%. The gap went from 11 points to 5, which is the version that tends to get cited as evidence that things are improving. Then you look at breast cancer. Black women’s survival went from 62% to 84%. White women went from 76% to 93%. Both numbers moved enormously. The distance between them is still 9 points. After fifty years. And then there’s ovarian cancer, where Black women actually had higher survival rates than white women in 1975. They don’t anymore. Nobody leads with that.
The types of cancer that remain hardest to beat
Pancreatic cancer: 3% in 1975. 13% now. Call it a fourfold improvement; it’s still 13%. Liver cancer at 22%. Esophageal cancer at 22%. Decades of trials, funding cycles, and research publications. The gap between what medicine has managed elsewhere and what it has managed here is not closing at the same rate. Some of this is biology. Some of it is that late-stage detection leaves almost nothing to work with. Both true. Neither makes the number easier to look at.
The bottom line
The fifty-year arc goes from 49% to 69% overall. Real number, real lives. What it also does is flatten a much more complicated picture into something that feels more resolved than it is. The improvement is uneven across cancer types, races, and decades. The headline version of this story is true. It is not the whole truth.
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