Objective To explore the diagnostic value of miRNAs for pancreatic cancer. Methods PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, CBM, CNKI, WanFang Data and VIP databases were retrieved from inception to December 31st 2015, to collect diagnostic accuracy studies about miRNAs for pancreatic cancer. Two reviewers independently screened literature, extracted data and assessed the risk of bias of included studies by using the QUADAS-2 tool. Then meta-analysis was performed using MetaDiSc 1.4 and Stata 12.0 softwares. Results A total of 40 articles involving 109 studies were included. The results of meta-analysis showed that the pooled Sen, Spe, +LR, –LR and DOR were 0.81 (95%CI 0.80 to 0.82), 0.77 (95%CI 0.75 to 0.78), 3.15 (95%CI 2.78 to 3.58), 0.27 (95%CI 0.24 to 0.31) and 13.58 (95%CI 10.89 to 16.94), respectively. The AUC of SROC was 0.86 (95%CI 0.84 to 0.88). Subgroups analysis showed that: as to diagnostic accuracy, Caucasian was superior to Asian (AUC=0.89vs. 0.84); multiple-miRNAs profiling-based assays was superior to single miRNA assays (AUC=0.91vs. 0.84). Conclusion Current evidence suggests that miRNA has potential diagnostic value for pancreatic cancer, particularly using multiple miRNAs. Due to limited quality of the included studies, more high quality studies are needed to verify the above conclusion.