At the single-variant level, our study reveals that a rare missense variant in TERT is associated with substantially reduced prostate cancer risk (OR = 0.13 [0.07–0.25], P = 4.67×10−10), and confirms rare non-synonymous variants in a further three genes associated with reduced risk (ANO7, SPDL1, AR) and in three with increased risk (HOXB13, CHEK2, BIK). Here, TERT is linked to prostate cancer.