Publication, Part of Cancer registrations statistics, England
Cancer Registration Statistics, England, 2022
National statistics, Accredited official statistics
New data added:
- Incidence counts and rates have been re-stated for cancers diagnosed between 2012 to 2022, reflecting the updated populations available using the 2021 census
- Counts and rates have been provided for Persons in addition to Males and Females
- We now use https://fingertips.phe.org.uk/documents/2021-lsoa-imd-lookup.xlsx to align deprivation scores with 2021 LSOAs
- The data downloads for Cancer Registrations (Incidence) now contain counts and age-standardised rates for England only. The interactive dashboard contains counts, age-specific, non-standardised and age-standardised rates for England and sub-national geographies
Coming Summer 2025:
- Incidence counts and rates for small geographic areas including, Upper Tier Local Authority (UTLA) 2024 boundaries, Local authority district / unitary authority (LAUA) 2024 boundaries and Middle layer super output area (MSOA) using census 2021
5 June 2025 11:00 AM
Correction notice:
A coding error has resulted in incorrect populations being used as a denominator for age-specific rates for sub-national estimates. This has affected Tables 1 to 4. The coding error has been fixed and the age-specific rates for Government office regions, Cancer alliances, and Integrated care boards have been updated to the correct values.
12 November 2024 12:25 PM
Cancer incidence by main cancer group
This section concentrates on the main cancer groups defined using a mixture of ICD-O-3 and ICD-10 as described in the Introduction.
The 15 most common main cancer groups cover 90% of diagnoses in 2022 if Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC) and cutaneous Squamous Cell Carcinoma (cSCC) (both are types of non-melanoma skin cancers), are excluded and 94% of diagnoses if BCC and cSCC groups are included.
Excluding BCC and cSCC, half of all registered cancer diagnoses (51%) continue to be found in the 4 most common main cancer groups: prostate, breast, lung, or bowel.
In 2022, the NHS teamed up with Prostate Cancer UK to deliver a six-week campaign from mid-February, urging men to use the charity’s online risk checker in a bid to reduce the shortfall in men starting prostate cancer treatment since the pandemic began; this resulted in an all-time high number of urgent referrals for suspected cancer in March 2022. Prostate cancer was the most commonly diagnosed cancer in 2022, with 54,732 new diagnoses, which is 11,354 more registrations than in 2021.
In 2021, for the first time this century, there were more bowel cancers registered than lung cancers. However, in 2022, this returned to the regular pattern with a higher number of lung cancer registrations (41,713) than bowel cancer registrations (39,933).
Figure 1 shows the number of new diagnoses of the 25 most common cancer groups split by gender. More detailed breakdowns by type of cancer and age are available in the downloadable data tables.
Figure 1: Number of diagnoses of the 25 most common cancers registered split by gender, England, 2022
Last edited: 10 June 2025 11:46 am