Background It is of considerable interest to forecast the future burden of mesothelioma mortality. Data on deaths are available, whereas no measure of asbestos exposure is available.

Methods We compare two Poisson models: a response-only model with an age-cohort specification and a multinomial model with epidemiologically motivated frequencies.

Results The response-only model has 5% higher peak mortality than the dose–response model. The former performs slightly better in out-of-sample comparison.

Conclusions Mortality is predicted to peak at about 2100 deaths around 2017 among males in cohorts until 1966 and below 90 years of age. The response-only model is a simple benchmark that forecasts just as well as more complicated models.