OBJECTIVES Cancer accounts for around 1.3 million deaths and €50 billion in healthcare expenditure in the European Union. Balancing increasing treatment costs and prevalence will be increasingly difficult for governments to manage. Advances in immunotherapies provide hope for a cancer cure; however its cost might be out of reach for governments under current health economic evaluation methods which will be the aim of this research. METHODS The years of life lost (YLL) in the UK due to cancer were obtained from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) database and multiplied by the NICE cost effectiveness threshold of £20,000 per Quality Added life Year (QALY), this gave a first estimate of the potential cost of a cancer cure that would be within an acceptable cost effectiveness threshold. This cost was then modified to take into account the quality of life (QoL) of the general population, QALY discounting, cancer onset age, and other demographics. YLL due to disability in cancer were not included in the calculation. RESULTS It is estimated that 32.4% of the total YLL per year in the UK (5,615,310) are a consequence of cancer. The cost of saving these YYL at £20,000 per QALY was estimated to be around £12 billion for all cancers per year, meaning an extra £425 in taxes would have to be generated from each taxpayer. CONCLUSIONS A cancer cure evaluated under current health economic evaluation methods would cause a budget impact that would be unaffordable for governments due to the high prices that could be achieved while remaining cost effective. Although these types of technologies therapies are not currently available, payers might want to explore new methods of evaluation, as exploring the possibility of calculating costs based on quality adjusted lifetimes rather than years or increasing discount rates on QALYs for immunotherapies.