Heart failure (HF) is a complex clinical syndrome and is thought to have a genetic basis. Numerous case-control studies have investigated the association between heart failure and polymorphisms in candidate genes. Most studies focused on the angiotensin-converting enzyme insertion/deletion (ACE I/D) polymorphism, however, the results were inconsistent because of small studies and heterogeneous samples. The objective was to assess the association between the ACE I/D polymorphism and HF. We performed a meta-analysis of all case-control studies that evaluated the association between ACE I/D polymorphism and HF in humans. Studies were identified in the PUBMED and EMBASE databases, reviews, and reference lists of relevant articles. Two reviewers independently assessed the studies. Seventeen case-control studies with a total of 5576 participants were included in the meta-analysis, including 2453 cases with HF and 3123 controls. The heterogeneity between studies was significant. No association was found under all the four genetic models (D vs. I, DD vs. ID and II, DD and ID vs. II, DD vs. ID). Subgroup analyses for ischemic HF (IHF) and HF because of dilated cardiomyopathy (DHF) also showed no significant association between ACE I/D polymorphism and HF. No significant association between the ACE I/D polymorphism and risk of HF was found in this meta-analysis. The future studies should focus on large-scale prospective and case-control studies which designed to investigate gene-gene and gene-environment interactions to shed light on the genetics of HF.