OBJECTIVES:  Asthma holds considerable risk for developing lung cancer. It can be assumed that asthma has an effect on hospitalizations and healthcare costs accrued by lung cancer patients. This study looks at differences in patient characteristics, healthcare utilizations and costs between lung cancer patients with asthma and without asthma. METHODS: The study used 2010 Seer-Medicare registry and hospitalization data for cancer sites lung, bronchus and not otherwise specified lung cancer to look at patient characteristics and measures of health service utilizations and costs. Two patient groups were formed based on having any or no asthma diagnosis during hospitalization. Descriptive statistics like frequency, percentage, mean and standard deviation were used to characterize differences in patient demographics, cancer histology, service utilization and costs between the two groups.  RESULTS: In the prevalence sample of 14371 cases, 508 patients had a diagnosis of asthma. Patient characteristics like gender female (66.34% vs 49.34%), race African American (18.11% vs 10.86%), residence in big metropolis (56.69% vs 51.40%) and histology squamous cell carcinoma (24.41% vs 22.31%) showed differences in presence of asthma in the population. Asthmatics (mean: 7.29 days; SD: 13.70) had lower mean length of stay when compared to non-asthmatics (mean: 8.56 days; SD: 16.73). Asthmatics had more intermediate inpatient intensive care use (54.55% vs 52.18%) and had more pharmacy costs (mean: $4853.53; SD: 11038.30 vs mean: $4167.20; SD: 6132.22) and outpatient costs (mean: $11.59; SD: 237.65 vs mean: $5.26; SD: 90.40) when compared to non-asthmatics.  CONCLUSIONS: There are subtle differences in patient characteristics, healthcare utilization and costs between lung cancer with asthma and without asthma. Intuitively, utilizations and costs should be more abundant in asthmatics. However, our study suggests that this variation may not be marked across all utilization and cost measures.