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Cage in the rolling bearing fulfills the following roles:

- separates rolling elements evenly around the periphery
- prevents contact of rolling elements and their sliding
- prevents falling out of the rolling elements from separable or self-aligning bearings when mounting.

From the point of view of design and material the cages are divided into pressed and machined.

Pressed cages are made of steel or brass sheet and are mostly used in dimensionally smaller and medium bearings. Their advantage in comparison with the solid cages is the smaller weight. Machined cages are made of steel, brass, bronze, light metals or plastic in various designs. Cages made of metals are used when there are higher demands on the cage rigidity and the bearing is determined for higher operational temperatures. Cages are radially centered on the rolling elements in bearings, this is the most usual way, or they are centered on the rib of either of the bearing rings.

Bearings without cages, i.e. with full complement of rolling elements, are only rarely used, namely only for some bearing types, e.g. single row needle roller bearings.
In the texts about individual bearing types the survey of cages in standard design and delivery possibilities of bearings with cages of non-standard design are given in the section Cages.