Cervical cancer (CC) is the fourth largest cancer affecting the global survival of women. Apolipoprotein C1 (APOC1) has been implicated in the pathogenesis and progression of various malignancies. Here, we investigated the expression and clinical significance of APOC1 in patients with CC. Gene expression data and the corresponding clinical features of CC were downloaded from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database. The expression levels of APOC1 were evaluated by the R software package. An enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) was used to detect the serum levels of APOC1 expression in 120 CC patients and 60 healthy controls. The diagnostic value of serum APOC1 level for CC was then evaluated by receiver operating characteristic curve analysis. The expression levels of APOC1 in CC tissue were significantly higher than that in adjacent tissues (p < 0.001). ELISA further confirmed that serum levels of APOC1 were significantly higher in CC patients than im normal controls (p < 0.001). With an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.826 (95% confidence interval: 0.766–0.888; p < 0.05), serum APOC1 can serve as a reliable molecular biomarker for differentiating CC patients from healthy controls. Moreover, we found that elevated serum APOC1 levels were significantly associated with poor clinical stage (p = 0.025) and positive lymph node metastasis (p = 0.002). In addition, serum APOC1 level was positively correlated with clinical stage (p < 0.01) and lymph node metastasis (p < 0.05) in CC patients. Thus, our results indicated that serum APOC1 was significantly higher in tissues and serum from CC patients and represents a potential novel biomarker for the diagnosis of CC.