High-standard farmland construction policy is an important initiative to enhance the comprehensive production capacity of agriculture and create conditions for increasing farmers’ income. This paper focused on the panel data of 31 provinces in China from 2005 to 2022, relying on the logical framework of quasi-natural experiment, and adopted continuous double-difference model and two-stage estimation method to deeply analyze the causal effect of high-standard farmland construction policy on farmers' income increase and its influence mechanism. The results showed that: (1) the high-standard farmland construction policy had a significant effect on farmers’ income increase, showing an increasing trend year by year; (2) the high-standard farmland construction policy positively promoted farmers’ income increase in the eastern, northeast, central and western regions and the arid, whereas those in the paddy fields and pastoral zones did not have the effect on farmers’ income increase; and (3) the high-standard farmland construction policy mainly boosted the farmers’ income by driving the increase in food production and the development of the agricultural production service industry. Accordingly, it is recommended to formulate regionally unbalanced policies, improve grain subsidy policy and focus on the development of agricultural productive services to fully realize its income-generating effect on farmers.