This study investigates the impact of career incentives of local leaders on China’s residential land transfer. It constructs the measure of career incentives of local leaders by utilizing a large resume dataset of 1266 city leaders in 292 Chinese cities from 2000 to 2014 according to the method used by Wang et al. (2019). Matching the city leaders data with the residential land transfer data from 2006 to 2014 in 46 Chinese cities, our empirical results show that one-standard-deviation increase in a local leader’s career incentive will lead to 12.29% decrease in residential land transfer area, 27.35% increase in residential land transfer price, 20.05% increase in residential land transfer revenue and 2.99% increase in the ratio of areas transferred through auction to all transferred residential land areas.