Objective To systematically review the prognostic value of progesterone receptor (PR) for survival in ovarian cancer. Methods PubMed, EMbase, MEDLINE, The Cochrane Library (Issue 1, 2016), CNKI, VIP, CBM and WanFang Data databases were searched for cohort studies on the correlation between PR expression and prognosis of ovarian cancer from inception to June 1st 2016. Two reviewers independently screened literature, extracted data and assessed the risk of bias of included studies. Meta-analysis was performed by using RevMan 5.3 software. Results A total of 12 studies involving 1 881 patients were included. The results of meta-analysis showed that the PR positive patients was superior than the PR negative patients on overall survival (OS) (HR=0.64, 95%CI 0.44 to 0.93,P=0.02), disease free survival (DFS) (HR=0.64, 95%CI 0.48 to 0.85,P=0.002), progression free survival (PFS) (HR=0.62, 95%CI 0.47 to 0.82,P=0.000 9) and remission rate of chemotherapy (OR=1.91, 95%CI 1.28 to 2.86,P=0.002). When analysis based on the clinical pathogesis stages, PR expression was higher in clinical stages Ⅰ-Ⅱ than stage Ⅲ-Ⅳ (OR=2.38, 95%CI 1.71 to 3.32,P<0.000 01), and was higher in cell differentiation G1-G2 than G3 (OR=2.48, 95%CI 1.72 to 3.56,P<0.000 01), while no significant difference was found in groups of serous ovarian cancervs. non serous ovarian cancer (OR=1.28, 95%CI 0.89 to 1.83,P=0.18). Conclusion The current evidence shows that the expression of PR protein have predictive value for the prognosis of ovarian cancer. Due to limited quantity and quality of included studies, the above conclusions are still needed to verified by more high quality studies.