We demonstrated that gastric adenocarcinoma associated, positive CD44 regulator, long intergenic noncoding RNA (GAPLINC) was significantly upregulated in bladder cancer tissues compared with normal tissues in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) cohort (P=0.039) and a validated cohort of 80 patients with bladder cancer (P=0.021). Statistical analysis revealed that GAPLINC expression level was associated with tumor stage in the validated cohort (P=0.017). Kaplan-Meier analysis demonstrated that patients in the high GAPLINC expression group had a worse overall survival (P=0.0386), indicating that GAPLINC may be a sensitive prognostic biomarker for patients with bladder cancer. Furthermore, knockdown of GAPLINC inhibited cell proliferation and colony formation, promoted cells cycle arrest at G1 phase and suppressed cells migration and invasion. The findings of the present study suggest that GAPLINC exhibits an oncogenic role in bladder cancer and may be a potential prognostic biomarker and therapeutic target.