Our results indicated that lncRNA HOTTIP was highly expressed in CRC compared with adjacent non-malignant tissues, and positively correlated with T stage, clinical stage, and distant metastasis in CRC patients. Furthermore, we also observed that increased lncRNA HOTTIP expression was an unfavorable prognostic factor in CRC patients, regardless of T stage, distant metastasis and clinical stage. Finally, overexpression of lncRNA HOTTIP was supposed to be an independent poor prognostic factor for CRC patients through multivariate analysis.