OBJECTIVES: Once largely confined to Western countries, breast cancer is now a major Asian healthcare issue. To examine how well governments are tackling breast cancer, we created a scorecard to map policy response to breast cancer in ten countries/territories: Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand. METHODS: The scorecard was developed through a review and thematic analysis of the literature. Five key policy areas emerged: Awareness-raising; early detection; treatment quality and access; palliative care; and data collection. Not so prominent in the literature but of increasing importance, is the shift towards survivorship. Therefore we added a sixth theme: Long term survivor support and openness to advocacy. These six themes (domains) formed the basis of the scorecard. Further reviews of the literature and primary research (interviews) were used to assign countries scores from 0 to 48 for each domain. RESULTS: First, wealth correlates with breast cancer control policy. Australia, with its strong reputation in cancer control, had the highest score, followed closely by other high-income countries. Good policy does not depend solely on income however – the next tier included Malaysia and Thailand, which have similar scores even though the former has a higher GDP per capita. Second, the focus of breast cancer control tends to be at the front end – awareness-raising, detection and treatment scores were higher than those for long-term support and palliative care. Third, while policy is crucial, it is not everything. Although outcomes broadly correlate with the scorecard results, important exceptions exist. Malaysia’s outcomes, for example, are as poor as India. CONCLUSIONS: Defining metrics is a challenge and comparable national information was rare on the ground. Inevitably, the results of such an exercise are indicative rather than precise. Nevertheless, they are a useful starting point for discussing the state of breast cancer control.