Abstract Background Foot and Mouth disease (FMD) is an acute contagious and highly infectious disease of domesticated and wild cloven-hoofed animals characterized by the appearance of vesicular lesions at the epithelium of the mouth, nares, muzzle, feet and udder, causing repeated outbreaks every year in Ethiopia, thereby causing production loss and the banning of exportation of livestock, products and their by-products. The prevalence of foot and mouth disease in Ethiopia has been reported from different parts of the country, but a pooled quantitative estimate of foot and mouth disease has not been done so far; therefore this meta-analysis sought to determine FMD status in Ethiopia.Main body Literature search was conducted by the main search engines and indexing services: Google, Google Scholar, PubMed, and Science Direct. Additionally, university repositories were discovered to retrieve unpublished MSc theses. All studies dealt with the prevalence of FMD. Raw data were extracted in Microsoft Excel and then imported into R Studio. Random effects model was used to pool estimates of outcomes at 95% confidence interval. Heterogeneity level was computed by Higgins’s I2 statistics. Publication bias was checked using funnel plots for standard error augmented by Begg’s and Egger’s tests. In total, 27 reports with 13,510 cattle were included in this study. An estimate of prevalence across reviews for the entire literature collected from the period 2007 to 2021 was 21.39% (16.53–26.56). Sub-analysis for herd size, animal composition, age group and sex of cattle identified as potential significant factors for FMD. FMD prevalence in cattle at early age and adult age was 19.5% and 14.6%, respectively (P < 0.01). Compared to intensive production, FMD occurrence was 4.3 times higher in extensive production (P value = 0.003).Conclusions FMD is prevalent in Ethiopian cattle, and the disease is a list A disease which could affect the export of live animals and their products since FMD is a trans-boundary disease. Therefore, it is imperative to have strategic implementation of effective prevention, control, and robust eradication policies.
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