The economic assessment of treatments or medical strategies has been the subject of an increasing number of publications. The elevated costs and modest efficacy of many treatments for lung cancer are an added impetus to such analyses. This review summarises the principal results of these analyses, the limitations of the methods used and discusses the evaluation of the cost of these cancers to society. The economic assessment of new chemotherapeutic drugs, and the place of cost-effectiveness analysis in randomized trials is also considered. In the final part, we outline future prospects for this area of research and the importance of such considerations for clinicians. These evaluations, which provide complementary data for clinicians when making decisions on therapeutic options, will be adopted more widely in coming years.