Summary Background The Milan criteria are used to select candidates with small hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) for liver transplantation. Due to severe shortage of donors, majority of patients within the Milan criteria need to seek alternative treatments. Aim To propose a prognostic model for these patients undergoing non-transplant therapies. Methods A total of 1106 HCC patients, who were within the Milan criteria and received non-transplant therapies were retrospectively analysed. Patients were randomly assigned to the derivation and validation set according to treatments. A prognostic model was constructed from independent predictors of survival identified in the multivariate Cox model of the derivation set and was confirmed in the validation set. Results In the Cox model, serum bilirubin ≥1.5 mg/dL [risk ratio (RR): 1.525, P = 0.016], α-fetoprotein (AFP) ≥100 ng/mL (RR: 1.728, P
