Trends in lung cancer risk and screening eligibility affect overdiagnosis estimates.

•We estimate overdiagnosis due to lung cancer screening in the general US population.•Decreasing smoking trends affect background cancer risk and screening eligibility.•We show that it is crucial to use appropriate methods to account for such trends.•Overdiagnosis among screen-detected cases increases from 7.1 to 9.5 % between 2018–2040.•Overdiagnosis among all lung cancer cases decreases from 3.7–1.4 % between 2018–2040.