Cancer Survival Hits a Milestone: 70% Now Live Five Years or More

For the first time, seven in ten people diagnosed with cancer in the United States now survive at least five years. That milestone, reported by the American Cancer Society in its annual Cancer Statistics, 2026, released on 13 January 2026, marks how far the fight against the disease has come. The five-year relative survival rate for all cancers combined has reached 70% for people diagnosed during 2015–2021 — up from only about half in the mid-1970s.

The long-term trend in deaths is just as striking. Cancer mortality has fallen 34% since its peak in 1991, a decline that the report estimates has averted roughly 4.8 million cancer deaths through 2023. “Seven in 10 people now survive their cancer five years or more, up from only half in the mid-70s,” said Rebecca Siegel, the report’s lead author and senior scientific director of surveillance research at the American Cancer Society.

“That milestone, reported by the American Cancer Society in its annual Cancer Statistics, 2026, released on 13 January 2026, marks how far the fight against the disease has come.”

The gains are especially encouraging for cancers that were once almost always fatal. Five-year survival for myeloma has climbed from 32% to 62%, liver cancer from 7% to 22%, and lung cancer from 15% to 28% since the mid-1990s. These improvements reflect a convergence of progress: sharp declines in smoking, earlier detection through screening, and a wave of better treatments, including targeted therapies and immunotherapy that simply did not exist a generation ago.

The report is honest about the work that remains. It still projects roughly 2,114,850 new cancer diagnoses and 626,140 deaths in the United States in 2026, and survival varies widely by cancer type, geography and access to care. Disparities along income and racial lines persist, and some cancers remain stubbornly hard to treat. But the overall direction is unmistakable and hopeful: steady declines in death rates, longer survival across the board, and millions of people alive today who would not have been a few decades ago.