Objective The aim of the study was to investigate the risk factors of lymph node metastasis in early gastric cancer (EGC) and develop a prediction model for the presence of lymph node metastasis. Methods The clinical data of 172 patients with EGC who underwent gastric cancer resection in the First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University from January 2017 to June 2019 were retrospectively analyzed. Then the patients were randomly divided into test set and validation set. Logistic regression analysis was used to determine the variables significantly related to lymph node metastasis. The accuracy of prediction model was judged by ROC curve, and the prediction model was verified by validation set. Results The lymph node metastasis rate of 172 EGC patients was 18.60% (32/172). Tumor size, depth of invasion, degree of differentiation and vascular tumor thrombus were associated with lymph node metastasis (P < 0.05), but invasion depth (OR = 8.975, 95% CI: 1.653-48.712, P = 0.011) and vascular cancer embolus (OR = 17.178, 95% CI: 2.336-126.304, P = 0.005) were independent risk factors for lymph node metastasis of EGC. The area under the curve (AUC) of the test set was 0.8641. The most common site of metastasis was group 2, followed by group 3. Conclusion We established and validated a predictive model for predicting lymph node metastasis of early gastric cancer, which can help clinical preoperative decision-making.