Cancer remains leading cause of death in Wales, new figures show
Cancer remained the leading cause of death in Wales in 2025, accounting for more than a quarter of all deaths.
There were 9,053 deaths from cancer in Wales in 2025, according to the Welsh Cancer Intelligence and Surveillance Unit (WCISU), part of Public Health Wales.
That was a slight fall compared with 2024 and with pre-pandemic levels, though the annual total had been rising slowly before the pandemic, largely because of Wales’s ageing population.
WCISU said it was too early to say whether the fall marks a lasting change.
Four cancers, lung, bowel, prostate and female breast, together accounted for 44 per cent of all cancer deaths in 2025.
Lung cancer remained the single leading cause, responsible for one in five cancer deaths.
Nearly six in ten cancer deaths, 59 per cent, were in people aged 75 and over in 2025, up from 48 per cent in 2002.
The cancer death rate remained 54 per cent higher in the most deprived areas of Wales than in the least deprived, a gap that has shown little improvement over time.
Professor Dyfed Wyn Huws, Director of WCISU, said:
“Cancer remains the leading cause of death in Wales, accounting for over a quarter of all deaths recorded in 2025.”
“Inequalities also remain stark as cancer death rates are over one-and-a-half times higher in the most deprived areas compared to the least deprived, and this gap has shown little improvement over time.”
In Flintshire, the county’s own cancer death rate has fallen to its lowest recorded level in more than two decades of data.
WCISU figures show Flintshire’s age-standardised rate, a measure that adjusts for the area’s age profile so different places can be fairly compared, stood at 265.4 deaths per 100,000 population for 2023 to 2025, against 264.7 for Wales as a whole, a gap the data does not class as statistically significant.
That is a marked change from the mid-2000s and early 2010s, when Flintshire’s rate was significantly higher than the Welsh average, including the three years to 2012, when it was flagged as “higher than Wales” in the official data.
Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, which covers Flintshire and the rest of north Wales, has recorded a cancer death rate running consistently a little above the Wales average for the past two decades, though the gap has never been wide enough for WCISU to class it as a statistically significant difference.
More than 1,300 people in Flintshire died with cancer as the underlying cause between 2023 and 2025, WCISU figures show.
Lung cancer mortality in the county has fallen sharply. WCISU’s figures show the age-standardised rate, which adjusts for the area’s age profile, has dropped by around a third since the early 2000s.
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