Objective: To explore the distribution of neutrophil lymphocyte ratio (NLR) in gastric cancer and its diagnostic value for staging. Methods: Data of 693 patients with gastric cancer undergoing radical gastrectomy in the First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University were retrospectively collected. The distribution of NLR was analyzed to compare its differences in the different stages, and analyzed the role of single variable of NLR and logistic regression model with NLR in the diagnosis of gastric cancer stages. Results: The median of NLR was 2.193 (range: 0.589–32.025), which did not follow the normal distribution (D=0.197, P<0.01). The difference of NLR in different stages was statistically significant (P<0.01), NLR of stage III and II+III+IV was higher than that of stage I respectively, NLR of stage III+IV was higher than that of stage I+II. The multiclass area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was 0.580. AUC was 0.585 (P<0.05) and 0.577 (P<0.05) for differentiating stage II+III+IV from I and stage III+IV from I+II respectively. When the sensitivity was 0.8–1.0, partial AUC were both 0.524. Compared with the model without NLR, the models with NLR had significant improvement as assessed by the net reclassification improvement (NRI) (0.351, 95%CI: 0.186–0.516, P<0.01) and integrated discrimination improvement (IDI) (0.017, 95%CI: 0.009–0.025, P<0.01). Conclusion: The distribution of NLR in gastric cancer is skewed, and there are differences among different stages. NLR could improve logistic regression model for predicting gastric cancer stages.