Background The prognosis of early-onset colorectal cancer (EOCRC) remains largely constrained by clinical heterogeneity. The aim of this paper was to construct a targeted prognostic nomogram combining multi-indicator to individually predict overall survival (OS) for EOCRC.Methods 6893 patients from the SEER database (SEER training set: n = 3447; SEER validation set: n = 3446) and 271 patients from the Second Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University (External validation set) were included. Independent factors in the multivariate analysis were used to build the nomogram. The performance of nomogram was examined by calibration curves, net reclassification improvement (NRI) index and integrated discrimination improvement (IDI) index, decision curve analyses (DCA) and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves.Results Race, marital status, tumor location, histological type, tumor grade, T stage, N stage, M stage, preoperative CEA level, postoperative chemotherapy were identified as independent prognosticators for OS. The calibration curves of the nomogram showed good consistencies between predicted and observed OS. The AUCs, IDI and NRI indicated that the nomogram predicted prognosis with better accuracy than the TNM staging system. DCA also suggested that the proposed nomogram owned more excellent net benefits in guiding clinical decision than TNM staging system.Conclusion The current study conducted a prognostic analysis and built a prognostic nomogram for EOCRC patients, And the nomogram demonstrated superiority over the TNM staging system regrading to prediction capacity for EOCRC patients.