Objective To investigate the expression of sodium-coupled neutral amino acid transporter 1 (SNAT1) in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) tissues, and to evaluate its prognostic value in patients with ESCC. Methods The tissue microarray including 183 ESCC tissues and their corresponding adjacent tissues was subjected to immunohistochemistry detection and Western blotting analysis of SNAT1 expression, and their correlation with the clinicopathological parameters and overall survival time was analyzed. Results SNAT1 was highly expressed in ESCC tissues, with the positive rate being 45.4% (83/183); we also noticed that it was not expressed in normal squamous epithelium tissues. Our analysis results indicated that overexpression of SNAT1 was significantly correlated with tumor size (P=0.023), lymph node metastasis (P=0.007) and tumor stage (P=0.003). The Kaplan-Meier analysis showed that patients with overexpression of SNAT1 had significantly worse outcome than those with negative SNAT1 expression (P<0.001). Cox regression analysis revealed that overexpression of SNAT1 was an independent factor for prognostic of patients with ESCC (P=0.004). Conclusion The expression of SNAT1 is abnormally increased in ESCC tissue, indicating that SNAT1 expression may serve as an important biomarker for prognosis evaluation in patients with ESCC.