diff --git a/ci/requirements-2.7.txt b/ci/requirements-2.7.txt
index 951c8798bef15..d2a3a8ea3cf03 100644
--- a/ci/requirements-2.7.txt
+++ b/ci/requirements-2.7.txt
@@ -22,4 +22,4 @@ html5lib=1.0b2
 beautiful-soup=4.2.1
 httplib2=0.8
 python-gflags=2.0
-google-api-python-client=1.2
+google-api-python-client=1.2.0
diff --git a/pandas/io/gbq.py b/pandas/io/gbq.py
index 06ad8827a5642..fb19ba0ee766e 100644
--- a/pandas/io/gbq.py
+++ b/pandas/io/gbq.py
@@ -1,4 +1,5 @@
 from datetime import datetime
+import re
 import json
 import logging
 import sys
@@ -25,8 +26,10 @@ def _check_google_client_version():
         raise ImportError('Could not import pkg_resources (setuptools).')
 
     _GOOGLE_API_CLIENT_VERSION = pkg_resources.get_distribution('google-api-python-client').version
+    _GOOGLE_API_CLIENT_VERSION = re.sub(
+        r'(\.0+)*$', '', _GOOGLE_API_CLIENT_VERSION)
 
-    if LooseVersion(_GOOGLE_API_CLIENT_VERSION) < '1.2.0':
+    if LooseVersion(_GOOGLE_API_CLIENT_VERSION) < '1.2':
         raise ImportError("pandas requires google-api-python-client >= 1.2.0 for Google "
                           "BigQuery support, current version " + _GOOGLE_API_CLIENT_VERSION)
 
@@ -121,7 +124,7 @@ def get_service(self, credentials):
 
         try:
             from apiclient.discovery import build
-        
+
         except ImportError:
             raise ImportError('Could not import Google API Client.')