The major mood disorders, which include bipolar disorder (BD) and major depressive disorder (MDD), are substantially heritable, but few risk loci have been identified. We performed a meta-analysis of 5 major mood disorder case-control samples, including over 13,600 unique individuals genotyped with approximately 500,000 to 1 million single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers on high-density arrays. Allele-wise association results were meta-analyzed with a method that weights results by sample size. We found genome-wide significant evidence that SNPs in a region of chromosome 3p21.1were associated with major mood disorders. The SNP rs2251219 returned the smallest meta-analysis p-value, 3.63 × 10−8, with a pooled odds ratio of 0.87. Supportive results were observed in 2 out of 3 independent samples tested in a replication study. These results implicate one or more genes in this region in the etiology of major mood disorders and suggest that BD and MDD share genetic risk factors.