AIM: To describe the histopathologic and clinical features of eyelid tumor cases from Tianjin Eye Hospital during 2002 to 2015. METHODS: In this retrospective study, a total of 2228 cases of eyelid tumors with pathologic diagnoses were enrolled. The eyelid tumors were classified into three groups according to tumor origin: epidermal, adnexal and miscellaneous, including melanocytic, neural and vascular lesions. Inflammatory tumor-like lesions were excluded. The clinical characteristics of the eyelid tumors were analyzed, including age, gender and lesion location. RESULTS: Most eyelid tumors were epidermal in origin (1080, 48.5%), followed by miscellaneous (885, 39.7%) and adnexal tumors (263, 11.8%). Among all the tumors, 292 (13.1%) were malignant lesions, 1910 (85.7%) benign and 26 (1.1%) premalignant lesions. Most malignant tumors originated from epidermal cells (60.0%), followed by adnexal cells (34.6%). The most common malignant tumors were basal cell carcinomas (56.5%) followed by sebaceous carcinoma (34.6%), squamous cell carcinomas (3.8%) and lymphoma/plasmocytoma (1.7%). The benign and premalignant eyelid lesions mostly originated from epidermal cells (46.4%) followed by miscellaneous cell sources (45.2%), including melanocytic nevus (33.8%), seborrheic keratosis (13.7%), squamous cell papilloma (13.0%) and epidermal cysts (11.5%). CONCLUSION: Eyelid tumors are mostly epithelial in origin. Benign tumors are significantly more common than malignant tumors with an obvious female predominance, and the most frequent malignant tumor are basal cell carcinoma, sebaceous carcinoma and squamous cell carcinomas. The tumor clinical features varied among the different subtypes.