Pancreatic cancer has the worst prognosis of any gastrointestinal cancer, with the mortality approaching the incidence. Early detection is crucial for improving patients' prognosis. CA242 has been widely reported to play a role in diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. However, published data on this subject are inconclusive. Therefore, we performed a meta-analysis to evaluate the diagnostic value of CA242 in pancreatic cancer. We searched all the eligible studies through PubMed, Embase, and the Cochrane Library databases without language limitation. Studies were assessed for quality using the quality assessment of studies of diagnostic accuracy (QUADAS). Positive likelihood ratio (PLR) and negative likelihood ratio (NLR) were pooled separately and compared with overall accuracy measures diagnostic odds ratio (DOR) and symmetric summary receiver operating characteristic (SROC). The PLR and NLR and their 95 % confidence interval (CI) were calculated using a fixed effects model according to the Mantel-Haensed method and random effects model based on the work of DerSimonian and Laird, respectively. A total of eight studies were included for analysis. The pooled sensitivity was 0.719 (95 % CI 0.690-0.746). The pooled specificity was 0.868 (95 % CI 0.849-0.885). The DOR estimate was performed and the result was (16.261). Our meta-analysis showed that CA242 could play an important role in the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.