Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a common malignant tumor in the clinic. Although there are increasing numbers of available treatment methods, their therapeutic effects are not satisfactory. The clinical indicators commonly used to predict the prognosis of HCC include tumor size, degree of cirrhosis, degree of tumor differentiation and tumor microvascular invasion; however, there are currently no molecular indicators that can predict the prognosis of HCC. Due to the differences in the progression of liver cancer among individuals, there is a growing need for prognostic biomarkers to accurately stratify patients for appropriate risk-adaptive treatment. The DNA topoisomerase 2-α (TOP2A) gene, which is located on human chromosome 17, encodes DNA topoisomerase IIα. Previous studies have demonstrated that TOP2A indicates a poor prognosis in patients with various types of tumors, but no such studies are currently available on HCC. By analyzing the differential expression of TOP2A in 50 pairs of tumor and paracancerous tissue samples in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database, the present study revealed that the expression of TOP2A was significantly higher in tumor tissue compared with that in paracancerous tissue (P=6.319×10^-16). In the collected clinical samples, the mRNA expression levels of TOP2A were significantly upregulated in HCC tumor tissues compared with those in the paracancerous tissues (P=6.40×10^-3), suggesting that TOP2A was associated with the occurrence and development of liver cancer. In addition, the associations between TOP2A expression, clinicopathological features and prognosis were analyzed using a multi-center large sample dataset from TCGA database, and the results demonstrated that high expression of TOP2A was associated with a higher T stage, poorer clinical stage and higher histological grade compared with those in patients with low TOP2A expression. High expression of TOP2A was also identified to be associated with a poor prognosis of HCC, particularly in Asian populations. These results suggested that high expression of TOP2A in HCC tissues may be closely associated with tumor progression and metastasis, which may be used as a biological indicator to predict tumor prognosis in clinical practice.