Seventeen articles with 22 independent reports involving 17,841 incident cases of coronary heart disease among 517,440 participants were included in our meta-analysis. A U-shaped relationship was detected between sleep duration and risk of coronary heart disease, with the lowest risk at 7–8 h per day. Compared with 7 h sleep duration per day, the combined relative risk of coronary heart disease were 1.11 (95% CI = 1.05–1.16) for an reduction of 1 h and 1.07 (95% CI = 1.00–1.15) for an increment of 1 h. And the results almost did not change in the subgroup analysis of gender and fatal cases. Exclusion of any single study did not alter the combined relative risk. In addition, visual inspection of funnel plots, Begg's and Egger's tests failed to identify publication bias.