In the present study, we adopted candidate gene association study strategy with selected 39 potentially functional tag SNPs (tagSNPs) in eight genes involved in NER pathways: XPA, XPC, DDB2, ERCC1, ERCC2, ERCC3, ERCC4 and ERCC5. We determined whether these genes were associated with HCC in the second verification stage, and for the promising SNPs we investigated the effects of the SNPs on the mRNA expression of the corresponding genes. Here, ERCC5 is linked to hepatocellular carcinoma.