Breast Cancer Statistics UK: The Numbers for 2026

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in the UK. Around 59,400 people are diagnosed every year (that’s roughly 160 a day), and 1 in 7 UK women will be diagnosed with it at some point in their life.

That’s the headline. But the fuller picture, who it affects, how survival has changed, what screening actually catches, and what’s preventable, matters more than any single number. Here are the breast cancer facts for the UK as they stand in 2026, checked against the primary sources so you know exactly where each figure comes from.

Breast cancer statistics UK: at a glance

Sources: Cancer Research UK, NHS Digital. Full detail and sourcing for every figure below.

How common is breast cancer in the UK?

Breast cancer accounts for around 15% of all new cancer cases in the UK, more than any other cancer type. In women specifically, it’s even more dominant: it makes up roughly 3 in 10 new female cancer diagnoses, with around 59,000 women diagnosed each year.

You’ll sometimes see a slightly different headline number, around 55,000 women and 400 men a year, from Breast Cancer Now. Both figures are correct; they simply come from different reference years and counting methods (more on why this happens below). Broken down by nation, Breast Cancer Now’s figures work out at roughly 46,000 diagnoses a year in England, 4,800 in Scotland, 2,600 in Wales and 1,500 in Northern Ireland, plus a further 7,000 people a year diagnosed with DCIS, an early, non-invasive form of the disease.

If you’ve searched for “1 in 8 breast cancer”, it’s worth clearing up: that figure is the commonly quoted lifetime risk in the United States. The equivalent UK figure is 1 in 7, based on women born in 1961 tracked through their lifetime. It’s a small difference, but it matters if you’re trying to understand your own risk against the right dataset.

Incidence has risen by about a fifth since the early 1990s, though the rate of increase has slowed considerably; over the last decade the rise has been closer to 3%. Cancer Research UK’s own projections expect a slight fall by the late 2030s, to around 70,300 cases a year, but that’s still tens of thousands of people a year needing the same equipment, the same appointments, the same specialist nurses.

Breast cancer in men

It’s rare, but it isn’t rare enough to ignore. Around 420 men are diagnosed with breast cancer in the UK every year, fewer than 1% of all UK breast cancer cases, and most are over 60. Around 85 men die from it each year.

Because it’s so uncommon in men, diagnosis can sometimes come later simply because it isn’t the first thing anyone, including the man himself, thinks to check for. The symptoms are broadly the same as in women: a lump, changes to the nipple, or unusual swelling around the breast or armpit, and the advice is the same too. Get anything unusual checked.

Who is most affected, and why the numbers sometimes don’t quite match

Age is the biggest factor after being a woman. Around 80% of cases are diagnosed in women over 50, and a quarter of all cases are in people aged 75 and over. Between 5% and 10% of women with breast cancer are thought to carry an inherited altered gene, such as BRCA1 or BRCA2, that raises their risk.

One honest note on the data itself. You’ll notice that Cancer Research UK and Breast Cancer Now don’t always quote identical totals (59,000 versus 55,000 new female cases a year, for example). That’s not a disagreement about the disease, it’s a difference in reference years and how each organisation aggregates UK-wide registry data. We’ve used both throughout this piece and labelled which is which, because we’d rather you trust the numbers than have us quietly pick whichever sounds tidier.

Survival: the part of the data worth feeling hopeful about

This is where the trend line genuinely bends the right way. In the 1970s, only 42% of women diagnosed with breast cancer in the UK survived ten years or more. By 2018 that had climbed to 76.6%, close to double.

Age still matters here too:

Source: Cancer Research UK

Deprivation makes a measurable difference too. In England, 88.4% of women in the least deprived group survive five years or more, against 82.1% in the most deprived group. It’s a gap worth naming rather than glossing over, because it points to access and earlier diagnosis, not to anything about the disease itself.

Breast Cancer Now estimates that around 920,000 people are alive in the UK today after a breast cancer diagnosis, a number expected to rise to 1.4 million by 2045 as survival keeps improving. That’s the entire point of funding better equipment and earlier diagnosis: every year that survival curve moves is real people.

Screening: why the 70.6% figure matters

In England, women aged 50 to 70 are invited for breast screening every three years. In 2024-25, 70.6% of women invited took up that invitation, a small improvement on 70.0% the year before, but still some way off the 80% national target. Around 2.75 million women were invited that year and 2.15 million were screened.

Screening works. It found 19,291 cancers in 2024-25, a rate of 9.0 per 1,000 women screened, and routine screening is estimated to prevent around 1,300 breast cancer deaths a year in the UK. Of all new breast cancer cases in England, about a third are picked up through screening, over half through an urgent GP referral, and a small number as emergencies. Around 85% of cases with a known stage are now caught early, at stage I or II, when treatment has the best chance of working.

Every one of those numbers depends on equipment being available, working, and up to date, mammography machines, ultrasound, biopsy kit, in the hospitals actually running these clinics. That link between funded equipment and a stat like “70.6% uptake” or “1,300 deaths prevented” isn’t abstract. It’s the whole reason charities like ours exist.

Breast cancer deaths in the UK

Around 11,200 people die from breast cancer in the UK each year, roughly 31 a day. It’s still the fourth most common cause of cancer death overall, and the second most common in women specifically. Breast Cancer Now’s figures put this slightly differently again, around 11,500 women and 85 men, reflecting a different reference period, but the scale is consistent across both sources.

The trend, again, is the important part. Mortality has fallen by 46% since the early 1970s and by 16% over the last decade alone, driven by earlier diagnosis, screening, and better treatment. Cancer Research UK projects a further 13% fall by the late 2030s. Read alongside the survival figures above, this is a disease where the numbers have been moving in the right direction for fifty years, and where funded research and equipment are a large part of why.

What can be prevented?

Around 23% of breast cancer cases in the UK are considered preventable. The known contributing factors, by rough share of cases, are:

• Being overweight or living with obesity: 8%
• Alcohol: 8%
• Not breastfeeding: 5%
• Long-term use of post-menopausal hormone therapy: 2%
• The contraceptive pill: under 1%

None of these guarantee anything on their own, plenty of people with none of these risk factors are still diagnosed, and plenty of people with several never are. But they’re the levers within a person’s control, alongside checking your chest regularly for anything new or unusual and getting it looked at without delay.

What these numbers mean, and how you can help

Statistics like these can feel like they’re about someone else, until they’re not. Behind every one of the figures above is a person waiting for a mammogram slot, a biopsy result, or a clearer scan than the equipment in front of them can currently give.

That’s where we come in. Beat Breast Cancer is a family-run charity that donates 100% of what it raises directly to NHS trusts, funding the equipment and research that keep numbers like “70.6% screening uptake” and “76.6% ten-year survival” moving in the right direction. Recent grants include £10,000 to The Christie NHS Foundation Trust in Manchester and £10,000 to Guy’s & St Thomas’ in London, both for breast cancer diagnostic and treatment equipment. You can see the full list of NHS trusts we’ve funded, find out how to donate directly (and if you’re a UK taxpayer, Gift Aid adds another 25% at no cost to you), or help in a way that costs you nothing extra: we also collect old bras for recycling and reuse and work with local partners on clothing collections that raise funds for the same cause.

If you want to understand what breast cancer actually is, how it develops and what to look out for, our guide to breast cancer covers that in full. This page is the numbers behind it.