Determining the serum des-γ-carboxy-prothrombin (DCP) level is of great importance for the diagnosis of primary hepatocellular carcinoma (PHC). Although several studies have investigated the accuracy of diagnostic DCP tests for PHC, the results have been inconsistent.The aim of this study was to systematically evaluate DCP as a diagnostic standard for PHC.Several databases, including PubMed, EMBASE, MEDLINE (Ovid), the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), the VIP Database for Chinese Technical Periodicals (VIP), WanFang Data, and the China Biological Medicine Database (CBM), were searched from the date of database inception until July 1, 2015 to collect published international and domestic studies of DCP in the diagnosis of PHC. Two investigators screened the literature according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria, extracted the data, and assessed the methodological quality of the included studies.A total of 38 studies involving 11,124 cases were included (5298 cases in the PHC group and 5826 cases in the control group). A meta-analysis was then performed using Meta-Disc 1.4 and RevMan 5.2 software. The overall sensitivity, specificity, positive likelihood ratio (+LR), and negative likelihood ratio (-LR) of DCP for the detection of PHC were 0.66 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.65-0.68), 0.88 (95% CI: 0.87-0.90), 7.13 (95% CI: 5.73-8.87), and 0.33 (95% CI: 0.29-0.38), respectively. The area under the curve (AUC) of the summary receiver-operating characteristic curve (SROC) was 0.9002. In conclusion, DCP has moderate diagnostic utility for PHC. Owing to the heterogeneity and limitations of the included studies, the above conclusion requires further support from additional high-quality studies.