Cancer Survival in England, cancers diagnosed 2018 to 2022, followed up to 2023

Adult cancer survival estimates discussed in this text are net survival estimates. This is because adult cancer patients often die from causes unrelated to their cancer diagnosis. Overall survival estimates for adults are also presented in the accompanying tables and are non-standardised.   

Net survival estimates are presented non-standardised and age-standardised. Age-standardisation allows comparisons between population groups and over time. We use the International Cancer Survival Standard weightings. All age groups must pass validation rules to present an age-standardised estimate. Please refer to the Cancer survival methodology  documentation for more information on the validation rules. 

We also present confidence intervals at the 95% level for all survival estimates. A confidence interval is a range of values that is used to quantify the imprecision in the estimate of an indicator. A wider confidence interval shows that the indicator value presented is likely to be a less precise estimate of the true underlying value.  

The Cancer survival methodology documentation has more details on the methods used in this publication and accompanying tables.

Overall survival looks at what happens to a group of people after a cancer diagnosis and measures how many are still alive after a certain time. It includes deaths from any cause, not just cancer (for example, accidents or other illnesses). 

So, if overall survival is 75%, that means 25% of people have died from any cause. 

We use the Kaplan-Meier estimate to calculate overall survival in the tables that accompany this publication. 

Net survival looks at how people with cancer survive compared to similar people in the general population. It estimates the chance of survival from cancer alone, with other causes of death statistically removed. 

• 100% net survival → cancer does not affect survival 

• Less than 100% → cancer increases the risk of death 

• Above 100% → people with cancer live longer than expected (this can happen in some cancers like melanoma, often linked to higher socioeconomic groups).  

The survival estimates must be interpreted with care. They do not reflect the survival prospects for any individual cancer patient; they represent the net survival for all cancer patients in each area, in a given period of time, diagnosed with a specified type of cancer.

Patients have been excluded where a sex-specific diagnosis code does not match the person-stated gender.  This may have excluded some transgender and non-binary patients. More information about this is available on the Inequalities in cancer page of our website.

The cancer registry records self-stated gender at diagnosis and not sex assigned at birth. Due to small numbers and the risk of disclosure, we are unable to present survival estimates for males with cancers of organs such as the uterus, ovary, cervix, vagina and endometrial stromal sarcoma or females with cancers of the prostate and testes.

The stage at diagnosis of a cancer indicates how far the disease has progressed. Not every cancer has a staging system. The staging systems and for which cancer groups they can be applied are presented in Case-mix Adjusted Percentage of Cancers Diagnosed at Stages 1 and 2 in England Methodology. 

It is possible that changes in the quality of staging data could cause an overall increase or decrease in the proportion of diagnoses in each stage and therefore survival estimates by stage would be affected. Until the proportion of unknown stage is stable, we would caution against comparing the proportions of individual stages at diagnosis or their survival estimates over time. 

We used the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) to measure how deprived an area is, based on each person’s home postcode at the time of diagnosis. The IMD is a national measure of deprivation in England, and several versions have been released over time. For diagnosis years 2014 onwards, we have used IMD version 2019. Deprivation scores were linked to the smallest local area available, called a Lower Layer Super Output Area (LSOA, 2021 version). These areas were then divided into five equal-sized groups (called quintiles), from least deprived to most deprived, so that each group contained roughly the same number of areas.