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Background Inhibition of nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) in tumor cells can suppress tumor growth through expressing new antigens whose mRNAs otherwise are degraded by NMD. Thus NMD inhibition is a promising approach for developing cancer therapies. Apparently, the success of this approach relies on the basal NMD activity in cancer cells. If NMD is already strongly inhibited in tumors, the approach would not work. Therefore, it is crucial to assess NMD activity in cancers to forecast the efficacy of NMD-inhibition based therapy. Methods Here we develop three metrics using RNA-seq data to measure NMD activity, and apply them to a dataset consisting of 72 lung cancer (adenocarcinoma) patients. Results We show that these metrics have good correlations, and that the NMD activities in adenocarcinoma samples vary among patients: some cancerous samples show significantly stronger NMD activities than the normal tissues while some others show the opposite pattern. The variation of NMD activities among these samples may be partly explained by the varying expression of NMD effectors. Conclusions In sum, NMD activity varies among lung cancerous samples, which forecasts varying efficacies of NMD-inhibition based therapy. The developed metrics can be further used in other cancer types to assess NMD activity. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12920-017-0292-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.