Hormonal growth promotants (HGP) improve production efficiency, profit, and reduce the environmental impact of beef cattle production. Questions remain, however, about the effects of HGP on meat quality measures of toughness such as Warner-Bratzler shear force (WBSF), and taste-panel attributes of meat (i.e., tenderness, juiciness, flavor, and content of connective tissue). This meta-analysis used 31 experiments containing 181 treatment comparisons to evaluate the effects of HGP on meat quality, almost all using Musculus longissimus thoracis et lumborum. Experiments used different hormonal treatments and combinations, with cattle treated once or repeated times, different breeds and sexes of cattle, with or without electrical stimulation of meat, and with different lengths of time on feed and meat aging. The effects of multiple treatment comparisons in experiments were evaluated using robust regression models and compared with Knapp-Hartung and permutation meta-analytical methods. In general, the true variance of experiments, τ² was low (<0.1), but heterogeneity, was high (>50%) suggesting that much of the variance was due to measurement error. Treatment with HGP increased WBSF; use of multiple HGP implants was associated with an increase in WBSF of 0.248 kg (95% CI 0.203 to 0.292), but a single implant only increased WBSF by 0.176 kg (95% CI 0.109 to 0.242). Meat aging did not alter the impact of HGP on increased WBSF (P = 0.105); however, the point direction was toward a reduced impact with aging (ES = −0.005 per d aged). Experiments using trenbolone acetate treatments did not differ in WBSF from those using other implants (P > 0.150). Treatment with HGP was not associated with reduced tenderness assessed by sensory methods (P > 0.3) and repeated treatments with HGP increased tenderness (standardized mean difference = 0.468) compared with a single implant. Juiciness, flavor, and connective tissue were not associated with HGP use; whereas, there was a 5.5-point decrease in the Meat Standards Australia meat quality 4 score, albeit with limited experiments. There is a need for more targeted studies on the role of HGP in influencing meat quality to examine the effects of different HGP treatments and aging on WBSF, tenderness, juiciness, flavor, and other sensory measures.