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Background Chaperonin containing TCP1 subunit 7 (CCT7), a member of the chaperonin containing TCP1 complex (CCT), has been reported regulating the expression of many tumor-related proteins. In this study, we investigated the diagnostic and prognostic value of CCT7 expression for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Methods We investigated the CCT7 expression in HCC in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) and our cohort. The diagnostic and prognostic value were verified by receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) analysis and Kaplan-Meier analysis, respectively. The association between CCT7 expression with DNA methylation status was investigated in the TCGA database. Gene ontology (GO), The Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG), and gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) analysis were employed to identify the potential pathway in which CCT7 is involved in tumorigenesis and progression. Results CCT7 expression in HCC was significantly higher than adjacent normal tissues, and elevated CCT7 expression correlated with tumor stages and tumor grade. Furthermore, the ROC curve showed CCT mRNA expression has a better diagnostic value for HCC with early-stage and low alpha-fetoprotein expression. Positive predictive value (PPV) of CCT7 was higher than alpha-fetoprotein both in the GEO and TCGA database. The Multivariate Cox Regression analysis of clinicopathologic characteristics revealed that both high mRNA and protein expression of CCT7 were independent risk factors for overall survival (OS) and recurrence-free survival (RFS). High DNA methylation of CpG site(cg19515186) was associated with low CCT7 expression and better OS in HCC. The GO, KEGG and GSEA analysis demonstrated that CCT7 mRNA expression was associated with Spliceosome signaling pathway. Conclusions The findings of this study demonstrated that CCT7 has diagnostic and prognostic value for HCC.