The American Joint Committee on Cancer along with the International Union for Cancer Care have long supported the use of a standard language to define patients with cancer. The 7th and 8th editions of the AJCC-UICC staging systems have now been adopted and function to improve eye cancer research and clinical care. The major ophthalmic journals now require its use for research publications as to allow them to be compared and or combined in multivariate analysis. The largest ophthalmic societies now expect both tumor and patient staging in presentation. Clearly, the use of AJCC-UICC tumor staging has brought ophthalmic oncology into the mainstream of world-wide cancer care.