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Abstract Background The prognosis of patients with gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GISTs) is generally evaluated at the time of diagnosis but does not reflect the survival dynamics of patients in the future. Therefore, the purpose of this article was to evaluate the conditional survival (CS) of Chinese patients with GISTs after radical resection. Methods This retrospective study included 451 patients who underwent radical surgery for GISTs. A Cox proportional hazard model was used to evaluate the prognostic factors of disease-free survival (DFS). The 3-year conditional DFS (CDFS3) of patients who survived for x years was expressed as CDFS3=DFS(x + 3)/DFS(x). Results The traditional 3-year DFS rate decreased gradually from 94.0% at 3 years to 77.3% at 7 years, while the CDFS3 rate increased from 94.0 to 95.2% over the survival time of the patients. In addition, classic clinicopathological prognostic factors had different effects on CDFS3, with changes observed in survival time, but these effects were only slight or moderate (|d|