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There is a particular kind of searching that happens at two in the morning. You have a word you did not have yesterday. You want to know how many other people have that word, and what happens to them, and whether anyone has written it down plainly.
Most of what comes back is not written down plainly. It is written to move you.
So here are the numbers, as the people who actually count them have published them. Every figure below names its source and its year inside the sentence, and links the page it came from. If a number you have seen elsewhere is not here, it is because I could not find a primary source for it. That absence is part of the information.
How many children are diagnosed with cancer each year?
The National Cancer Institute estimated that in 2024, a total of 14,910 children and adolescents ages 0 to 19 would be diagnosed with cancer in the United States, and that 1,590 would die of the disease (Cancer in Children and Adolescents, updated August 2024).
That total breaks into two age groups. The same NCI fact sheet put 2024 diagnoses at 9,620 for children ages 0 to 14 and 5,290 for adolescents ages 15 to 19.
For the following year, NCI's Childhood Cancers topic page states that in the United States in 2025, an estimated 9,550 new cases of cancer would be diagnosed among children from birth to 14 years.
Those are two different numbers for two different age ranges and two different years. I am giving you both rather than averaging them into something tidier, because tidier would be made up.
What are the most common childhood cancers?
Leukemia is the most common. NCI's SEER Program reports that childhood leukemia accounts for 25.7% of all cancer cases in children and adolescents ages 0 to 19, based on incidence data for 2019 through 2023 (Cancer Stat Facts: Childhood Leukemia).
For the rest of the order, NCI's fact sheet lists the most common cancer types among children and adolescents ages 0 to 19 for 2016 through 2020 as, in descending order: leukemias; brain and other central nervous system tumors; lymphomas; epithelial neoplasms and melanomas; soft tissue tumors; germ cell tumors; and bone tumors.
The mix shifts with age. The same NCI fact sheet notes that leukemias were more common among children ages 1 to 4, and lymphomas were more common among adolescents ages 15 to 19.
What are the survival rates?
NCI's fact sheet gives five-year survival across all childhood cancers for 2013 through 2019 by age at diagnosis: 83.2% for children younger than 1 year, 87.8% for ages 1 to 4, 85.7% for ages 5 to 9, 85.5% for ages 10 to 14, and 87.3% for adolescents ages 15 to 19.
Two things are worth saying about that figure, and I want to say both.
The first is that it is an average across more than a dozen very different diseases, and the spread underneath it is wide. NCI reports five-year survival of 92.3% for acute lymphoblastic leukemia in 2014 through 2020. It also reports that for diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, about half of children survive less than one year, citing Hargrave and colleagues, 2006. One number does not describe both.
The second is that the averages moved. NCI's fact sheet puts five-year survival in the mid-1970s at 58% for children ages 0 to 14 and 68% for adolescents ages 15 to 19. For acute lymphoblastic leukemia specifically, it went from 57% in 1975 to the 92.3% above. For non-Hodgkin lymphoma, from 43% in 1975 to 91.4% in 2014 through 2020.
Mortality followed. NCI reports that the cancer death rate for people under 20 dropped from 5.1 per 100,000 in 1975 to 2.2 per 100,000 in 2022. In the same sentence, NCI states that approximately 1,600 children and adolescents still die of cancer each year in the United States.
Both of those are true at once. A statistic that improved is not a statistic that finished.
I am not going to tell you what any of this means for one particular child, because I do not know and neither does anyone who has not examined that child. A five-year survival percentage is a description of a population over a past period. It is not a forecast for a person.
What are the early signs of childhood cancer?
There is no single early-warning checklist for childhood cancer, because childhood cancer is not one disease. What exists is a list of signs per diagnosis, published by NCI.
For the most common one, childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia, NCI's patient-version PDQ summary (updated April 15, 2025) lists: fever; easy bruising or bleeding; flat, pinpoint, dark-red spots under the skin caused by bleeding (petechiae); weakness or fatigue; pale skin; bone or joint pain; shortness of breath or trouble breathing; painless lumps in the neck, underarm, stomach or groin; pain or a feeling of fullness below the ribs; loss of appetite; weight loss; abdominal pain; and frequent infections or infections that do not go away.
NCI follows that list with one sentence I would not improve on: "These symptoms may be caused by problems other than ALL. The only way to know is for your child to see a doctor."
That is as far as I will go, and as far as anyone writing a web page should go. Most children with most of those signs do not have leukemia. The list is not a diagnostic tool. It is a reason to make an appointment and, if the answer you get does not fit what you are seeing, to go back.
How is childhood cancer different from adult cancer?
It is far rarer. NCI's fact sheet, using SEER data for 2017 through 2021, gives an annual incidence of 17.14 cases per 100,000 for children under 15, compared with 74.9 per 100,000 for ages 15 to 39 and 528.9 per 100,000 for ages 40 to 64.
That gap of roughly thirty-fold between young children and middle age is the single most consequential number on this page. It explains a great deal about research funding, about drug development, and about why so few people around you have any idea what you are talking about. I have written about where that leads in why childhood cancer research gets so little money.
The diseases themselves differ too. The cancers that are most frequent in adolescents and young adults are often adult-type cancers, NCI notes, including breast cancer, melanoma and thyroid cancer. And cause looks different: NCI's fact sheet states that about 8 to 10% of childhood cancers are linked to an inherited pathogenic variant, and that environmental causes of childhood cancer have been difficult to identify.
Treatment differs as well. NCI reports that adolescents and young adults with acute lymphoblastic leukemia may do better on pediatric treatment regimens than on adult ones — which is to say that where a young person is treated, and by which protocol, is itself a variable.
Why does every number here carry a source?
Because the alternative is what you already found at two in the morning.
Childhood cancer statistics circulate in a strange way. A figure gets published once, with a year and an age range and a method. Then it gets repeated without the year. Then without the age range. Then it appears on a graphic, by which point it may be fifteen years old and describing a different measurement than the sentence around it claims.
We ran into this writing this post. Several of the most-shared childhood cancer statistics in the United States appear on advocacy pages with no primary source and no date attached at all. We left them out. Not because they are necessarily wrong, but because we could not check them, and a number you cannot check is not a fact, it is a rumor with a decimal point.
This matters beyond pedantry. If you are deciding where to send money, the organization's willingness to show you where its numbers came from is one of the few signals you can actually read from the outside. It is the first thing we look at, and it is the standard we try to hold ourselves to on pages like this one.
If you came here from September, the gold ribbon has its own history, and I have written separately about what happens when the awareness month ends and the posts stop.
This page gets reviewed and re-sourced once a year, and the links above get re-checked when it does. If you find a figure here that has moved, or a source that no longer resolves, I would genuinely like to know.
If the numbers made you want to do something with them, the standard we use to decide which organizations are worth funding is written out on our charities page, including what we check and what disqualifies a group. Use it on us too.
Danny H. Levin — founder, and part of Austin's family.
