From a micro perspective, as rational subjects, farmers typically aim to maximize their income when deciding how to dispose of farmland (Peng et al., 2025). The rational choice theory proposed by Coleman (2008) also posits that individuals select optimal action plans under constraints imposed by groups, organizations, and institutions, with the ultimate aim of realizing personal interests. Actors operate as purposeful rational agents looking to maximize their individual benefits, and each possesses distinct preferences. Concurrently, from the meso- and macrolevel perspectives, rural migration decisions are influenced by multiple interrelated factors. According to the “push-pull” theory, migration behavior is shaped by the “push factors” (rejection forces) of the origin area, the “pull factors” (attraction forces) of the destination area, intermediate barriers, and individual characteristics (Bogue, 1959; Lee, 1966). Increased farming costs, low agricultural returns, and insufficient employment opportunities due to agricultural labor surpluses in origin areas, in conjunction with higher income levels, better living environments, infrastructure, educational opportunities, and greater employment prospects in destination areas, collectively drive rural-to-urban migration. However, when there are substantial intermediate barriers between origin and destination areas—such as material obstacles, linguistic and cultural differences, migration distance, and migrant capabilities—migrants can reduce their social integration during the migration process. This may lead to an inability to continue, thereby resulting in return migration. On top of risk aversion, migrants often treat their contracted land as a last-resort “safety net,” are unwilling to transfer their land rights, and entrust their contracted fields to the family members that they leave behind—such as the elderly—for continued farming or even temporarily abandon their land to ensure their basic household livelihoods.

The literature indicates that sex, age, and educational attainment significantly influence farmers’ decisions regarding the disposal of contracted land (Luo et al., 2024; Liu et al., 2023; Mohanty and Lenka, 2023; Zhang H. et al., 2025; Prishchepov et al., 2021). Women and elderly people exhibit greater levels of risk aversion, which makes them more likely to make the decision to return to their hometowns (Tong and Chen, 2025). Furthermore, better farmer health is positively associated with the transfer-in of farmland management rights, while higher education is negatively associated with it (Tan et al., 2022). The number of family members in a household reflects the scale of its available labor, with research indicating that larger households are more inclined to maintain family cultivation (Xie, 2012). Concurrently, the amount of cultivated land area, as a fundamental resource endowment, directly influences farmers’ disposal capacity and choices: smaller household land holdings correlate with a lower willingness to transfer land (Zhang et al., 2024; Xu et al., 2019). The asset status of rural migrants also warrants attention. For instance, owning residential land may reduce farmers’ willingness to settle in cities (Han et al., 2024; Fan et al., 2025; Xie et al., 2023), which can indirectly influence how they dispose of their contracted land. Furthermore, difficulties encountered in their hometowns reflect the livelihood vulnerability of rural migrants, and such livelihood pressures can prompt them to adjust their land disposal strategies as a risk-coping technique.

Therefore, the following hypothesis and subhypotheses are proposed:

The integration process of rural migrants into cities is essentially a resocialization process. Occupational stability, economic income commensurate with local living standards, and equal social status form the foundational conditions for this process and serve as prerequisites for rural migrants’ genuine participation in the social lives of their destination communities. The occupational choices, occupational class, educational attainment, and nonagricultural employment income of rural migrant groups significantly influence their decisions regarding farmland transfer (Wang et al., 2016; Li et al., 2025; Chang et al., 2025). Research indicates that new-generation migrant workers with higher household incomes who migrate to urban areas for work possess stronger living capabilities and lower levels of land dependence, which makes them more inclined toward land transfer (Li et al., 2025). Suitable housing conditions also serve as key motivators for rural migrants to relinquish land and settle in cities (Zou et al., 2022), and migrants who own their own homes in their destination areas are more likely to transfer their land.

However, the current urban–rural dual social security system hinders migrant workers’ equal access to urban public resources, thereby exacerbating the exclusion that migrants’ face in destination cities and making it difficult for migrant workers to obtain the same social welfare and medical insurance as urban residents have (Song, 2014). Furthermore, the community isolation that migrants’ experienced after migration significantly negatively affects their identity formation and urban settlement (Wu et al., 2024). Consequently, farmers without stable urban employment who rely on migrant work for income are more prone to engage in “reverse migration.” Such migrants are reluctant to relinquish or transfer contracted land and even choose to leave it fallow to preserve their land rights and avoid migration risks (Sun et al., 2024).

On the basis of the above analysis, the following hypothesis and subhypotheses are proposed:

China has a vast territory featuring significant regional development differences. In noncoastal developed regions such as the western region, large numbers of rural laborers migrate to cities for work, and their land transfer rate is far below the national average, which leads to issues such as rural labor shortages, nongrain use of cultivated land, stagnant land transfers, and abandoned farmland (Hong et al., 2025; Huang et al., 2025). Moreover, Chinese farmers engage in part-time farming to a high degree, and most farmers engage in agriculture during peak seasons and seek off-farm employment during agricultural off-seasons. Additionally, they often rely on the household division of labor to balance agricultural and nonagricultural production (Lu et al., 2022). However, studies have also shown that as the time that farmers’ spend on nonagricultural employment increases, their willingness to transfer land also increases, and migrant workers who are employed in provinces at great distances from their hometowns exhibit stronger intentions toward land transfer (Cui et al., 2025). Therefore, when rural laborers migrate to cities for work, duration and distance significantly influence their willingness to transfer land. Migrant workers with shorter migration periods and smaller migration ranges are less inclined to transfer land and rather opt for family farming.

On the basis of the above analysis, the following hypothesis and subhypotheses are proposed:

“New citizens” refers to the permanent population consisting of migrant workers and other nonlocal workers with stable urban employment, as well as newly employed college graduates [National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), 2021]. To comprehensively and systematically understand the influencing factors and distinctive characteristics of the disposal methods of contracted land among the rural migrants of China, the migrant worker group among China’s “new citizens” is selected as the research sample for this study. This is based mainly on several key considerations. First, migrant workers in the “new citizens” group not only possess unique characteristics within the Chinese context but are also more closely aligned with the basic characteristics and connotations of rural migrants internationally. Second, unlike newly employed college graduates and many migrant worker groups who are non-rural registered but employed and living in other places for various reasons, this group retains contracted farmland in their places of origin to support their families’ livelihoods. Third, this group is massive, totaling 290 million people and accounting for approximately 42.8% of the rural registered population, which makes it as the core constituent group of “new citizens,” the characteristics of this population provide essential reference points for analyzing land disposition arrangements among rural migrants in China.

The research data are sourced from the China Migrants Dynamic Survey (CMDS), which employs a stratified multistage probability proportional to size (PPS) sampling method to collect samples from China’s 31 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities) and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. This survey targeted migrant populations aged 15 and above in nonsurvey areas (counties and cities) and yielded a total of 169,989 valid questionnaires. Samples of migrant workers from the CMDS (Volume A) who had contracted land in their hometowns were selected. The responses to the questionnaire item “Who cultivates your household’s contracted land?” were categorized into nine types: cultivated by self or family members, cultivated by relatives/friends, cultivated by hired labor, subleased to enterprises, subleased to village collectives, subleased to private individuals, abandoned, used for tree planting, and others. Given the small sample size for “tree planting” and “other” uses, these were excluded from the primary disposal methods for contracted land used in this study.

According to the ownership status and actual utilization methods of farmland management rights, and based on the research consensus in the fields of land resource management and agricultural economic management (Sun et al., 2024; Chen et al., 2025; Zou et al., 2018), the disposal methods of migrant workers’ contracted land are categorized into three types: continued household cultivation, land transfer, and abandonment. When samples were selected, those classified as “planting trees” or “other” were excluded, whereas the disposal methods “cultivated by oneself or family members,” “cultivated by hired labor,” and “cultivated by relatives or friends” were grouped under “continued household cultivation” (all three types share the core characteristic of no substantive transfer of farmland management rights, with the original contractor remaining the core decision-making and responsible entity for land operation); “Subleasing to private individuals,” “subleasing to village collectives,” and “subleasing to enterprises” were categorized as land transfer (all three types realize the legal transfer of farmland management rights from the original contractor to other operating entities (individuals, collective organizations, market entities), which is consistent with the definition of rural land contract management right transfer stipulated in China’s Rural Land Contract Law); while “abandoning cultivated land” was defined as “land abandonment” (characterized by the original contractor’s voluntary or passive abandonment of the production and operation of the contracted land, with no effective operating entity and no actual production input). Through manual collection and collation, samples from the total questionnaire sample that had no contracted land or whose disposal methods were not categorized as continued cultivation by the household, land transfer, or abandonment were excluded, resulting in a final valid sample size of 73,676.

The land disposal methods examined in this study—continuing household cultivation, land transfer, and abandonment—constitute categorical variables that can take more than two possible values. Considering that the land disposal methods of migrant workers do not overlap and cannot be ranked, the multinomial logit model was selected for quantitative analysis. The model is grounded in the random utility theory framework for discrete choice proposed by McFadden (1974), which serves as a standard and well-established analytical tool for examining individual decision-making among multiple mutually exclusive alternatives. It is specifically designed to estimate how the probabilities of individuals choosing among multiple unordered and mutually exclusive options are influenced by various factors.

Definition: yi = 1, 2, and 3 represent the i-th migrant’s choice of family farming, land transfer, or abandonment, respectively. The constructed model is shown in Equation 1:

where U ij represents the benefit gained by farmer i from choosing disposal method j ; β i denotes a series of factors influencing the farmer’s choice of disposal method for contracted land, which vary only with individual i ; and ε ij is the random disturbance term.

From the above equation, it follows that farmer i chooses disposal method j if and only if the profit from choosing disposal method j exceeds the profits from all the other disposal methods. Thus, the probability model for farmer i selecting disposal method j is shown in Equations 2, 3:

That is:

By performing maximum likelihood estimation on the above equation, the estimated value of parameter β can be obtained. However, before maximum likelihood estimation is conducted, a reference group must be selected, and its coefficient must be normalized to zero. Therefore, taking household farming ( y i =1) as the reference group, parameter β represents the propensity for choosing either of the other two land disposal methods relative to migrant workers who opt for household farming. Thus, the ratio of the occurrence of land transfer and abandonment relative to that of household farming is shown in Equations 4, 5:

The dependent variable of the study is the disposal method of contracted land, which is categorized primarily as either continued family cultivation, land transfer, and abandonment. The independent variables are selected from three dimensions: individual characteristics, integration status, and mobility factors. The specific variable definitions are shown in Table 1.

Prior to conducting the multinomial logit regression analysis, multicollinearity among the variables was first examined. The results indicated that the variance inflation factor (VIF) for all the selected variables were less than 10, confirming the absence of multicollinearity issues. The test results are presented in Table 11.

Since the independent variable is a multicategorical variable, to scientifically examine the factors influencing the three disposal methods of contracted farmland—continued household cultivation, land transfer, and abandonment—the study treats continued household cultivation is used as the reference group for farmland disposal. Individual characteristics, urban integration status, and migration factors across dimensions were incorporated into a multinomial logit model, and the occurrence ratio was used to explain the marginal impact of land disposal methods relative to the reference group (or the change in one unit of the independent variable). The regression results are shown in Table 12.

(1) The choice of disposal of contracted land by rural migrants is influenced by multidimensional and systematic factors. Individual characteristics, integration status, and various migration factors collectively shape migrants’ land disposal choices, revealing distinct patterns, types, and regional variations. Currently, a significantly greater proportion of rural migrants in China who choose to continue cultivating land through their households (including cultivation by family members themselves or through hired labor) than to transfer or abandon it. The underlying decision-making logic reflects a risk-hedging strategy and a “safety net” choice that serves as a response to the vulnerability of urban livelihoods.

(2) At the level of individual characteristics, rural migrants who are female, in good health, have a high level of education, own homestead land, have a large number of family members, have a small contracted land area, or face difficulties in their place of origin tend to entrust family members to continue farming rather than engaging in land transfer or abandonment when faced with the choice of contracted land disposal methods. This reflects the rational decision-making process of individuals who prioritize family security, institutional constraints, and emotional ties. First, female migrants have a heightened sensitivity to the risks associated with land rights. Rural females have long been disadvantaged in land contracting and management. Informal institutional practices that perpetuate gender discrimination have resulted in the land rights of rural females being neither enduring nor stable (Goli et al., 2025). Their choices are primarily made to hedge against land right uncertainties, urban life vulnerabilities, and the additional risks that stem from their gender roles. Second, the family functions as an economic community, integrating the “high returns” of external labor migration with the “low risk” of internal farming. Migrant workers allocate their “health capital” to the urban labor market to obtain higher returns and assign “land assets” to family members to ensure safety and maintain family bonds. This is particularly evident among migrant workers with large families, where decisions regarding contracted land serve as a proactive strategy based on optimal resource allocation. Finally, the disposal of contracted land represents a rational decision to minimize risks while maximizing benefits and security. On the one hand, as the knowledge levels of farmers increase, their understanding of land value and stable land rights deepens, which reduces their willingness to adjust their land holdings. On the other hand, land is viewed as the ultimate safeguard against life risks such as unemployment and illness, which is particularly true among rural migrants who face difficulties in their places of origin and possess limited land holdings. They would rather leave their land fallow or allow inefficient use than accept one-time compensation for the transfer of their land.

Furthermore, unlike the perspective of land attachment among the elderly group identified in previous studies (Purc-Stephenson et al., 2025; Conway et al., 2021; Kong et al., 2025), this research reveals that older migrants are more inclined to transfer their contracted land. This tendency may stem from two factors: first, as their labor capacity diminishes, stable rental income received from transferred land becomes a crucial supplementary source of pension income; second, against the backdrop of China’s unique cultural context, family traditions and population migration characteristics, older migrants often relocate to join their children who work or live in cities, and such migrants are more likely to transfer their land and exit agricultural production when alternative economic support becomes available.

(3) In terms of migrant integration status in destination areas, higher levels of economic and identity integration increase the probability of rural migrants choosing land transfer or abandonment over continued family farming. This stems from two factors: on one hand, increased household income enhances farmers’ risk resilience, improves their living standards, and facilitates their land transfer decisions. On the other hand, as social networks expand, rural migrants no longer have a sole reliance on kinship and geographical ties for spiritual support and emotional comfort, which weakens their attachment to their hometowns and thereby facilitates land transfer (Pan et al., 2025).

Concurrently, research has indicated that groups with high institutional integration are more likely to choose continued family farming. This phenomenon stems primarily from institutional design, perceived benefits, and the comprehensive considerations of migrant workers. Both field and existing research have revealed that despite the expansion of medical insurance coverage, migrant workers receive insufficient tangible benefits after enrolling. While participation rates have risen in recent years, the protection levels for migrants still lag behind those of urban residents. Inter-provincial migrants have a 42.7% lower immediate medical insurance reimbursement rate compared to local residents (Wang et al., 2022). Only 28.6% of migrants enjoy outpatient reimbursement parity with urban residents, while 61.3% forego medical treatment or return to their place of household registration for care due to barriers in transferring medical insurance relations (Chen et al., 2020). Additionally, issues such as cross-regional settlement and reimbursement rates create barriers to utilization. Furthermore, residence permits provide only basic registration and fail to address the underlying inequality of rights that is associated with household registration. Overall, migrant workers prioritize direct livelihood concerns such as income stability and career development. The current policies are only somewhat effective in facilitating land transfers for migrant workers, and they have relatively low marginal utility. Comprehensive measures that integrate income enhancement and rights protection are necessary to effectively advance urbanization.

(4) In terms of the various dimensions of mobility factors, rural migrants from Western Regions are more likely to choose either continued family cultivation of contracted land or land abandonment. Second, rural migrants with shorter migration distances prefer continued family cultivation, but land abandonment increases with longer migration duration. Third, compared with rural migrants who are actively seeking employment, those who migrate for family reasons are more inclined toward land transfer or abandonment (Xie et al., 2025). This stems primarily from the high proportion of agriculture in the Western Region’s economy, where land serves as a vital source of income for many households and encourages family members to either remain behind or entrust cultivation to relatives and friends. In addition, the natural resource endowment in the Western Region is poor and mostly tied to mountainous and hilly areas, and the economic foundation is weak and has a high incidence of return to poverty. Rural migrants, guided by economic rationality and practical constraints, can retain land as a livelihood buffer through either explicit or implicit abandonment via inefficient utilization. Moreover, migrant workers with shorter mobility distances are typically temporary or seasonal laborers whose face return costs that are significantly lower than those of interprovincial migrants. However, with increasing migration durations, migrant workers face multiple challenges, including high relational costs, poor trust, and inefficient land transfer markets, which makes them more inclined to temporarily set aside their land as a low-cost safeguard. Furthermore, household migration signifies longer-term and relatively stable urban settlement plans. With the complete transfer of labor, agricultural production has gradually transitioned from a “sideline” to a “burden.” However, in reality, such land abandonment behavior is motivated by a strong desire to retain contracted land rights.

In summary, the following insights and recommendations are offered. First, the precision of policy implementation should be enhanced. During the execution of contracted land transfer policies, tailored approaches should be adopted on the basis of individual migrant workers’ circumstances to facilitate the transfer of their family-contracted land, which avoids taking a one-size-fits-all approach. For rural migrant workers with stable employment and no conditions for entrusted land cultivation, priority should be given to pushing forward targeted information on land transfer cooperation with large-scale agricultural business entities; for those with flexible employment and partial capacity for self-cultivation, support should be provided for them to adopt a hybrid model of partial land transfer and partial self-cultivation; for those with no immediate intention of land transfer, supporting services such as the connection of entrusted cultivation services and agricultural production trusteeship should be offered, and mandatory guidance for land transfer shall be avoided. Second, a land transfer market that benefits both farmers and the public should be established. To address current issues such as low transfer efficiency, further efforts should be taken to advance pilot projects designed for standardizing rural property rights transfer markets, explore diverse models for transferring rural land contracting rights, for instance, short-term trusteeship-based land transfer, seasonal land transfer and shareholding cooperative land transfer are tailored to the diverse employment cycle needs of rural migrant workers, accelerate the institutional innovation in agricultural land systems, and improve all of the systems related to rural land transfers. Third, the transformation of migrant workers into “new citizens” should be facilitated. Vocational skills training is provided in response to the employment needs of rural migrant workers, multiple measures should be taken to improve migrant workers’ employment conditions in cities, consolidate the connection mechanism for their social security, enhance their substantive social security coverage, ensure that they and their accompanying family members enjoy equal welfare benefits as urban residents after enrollment, and increase their level of social integration in their destination areas. Fourth, social security for the family members that migrant workers leave behind should be improved. Inclusive, fundamental, and bottom-line social welfare programs need to be improved; convenient services and social work services need to be enhanced at the township level; and vulnerable groups such as left-behind children, left-behind elderly, and left-behind women require special attention. Comprehensive service stations for left-behind groups should be established in administrative villages. These measures can improve the living standards and well-being of family members left behind in migrant workers’ areas of origin. Fifth, multiple measures should be adopted to reduce the abandonment of contracted farmland. In collaboration with village collectives, a tripartite governance system for cultivated land abandonment integrating monitoring, disposal and guarantee should be constructed. The oversight of abandoned farmland should be strengthened, identification and diagnosis systems should be refined, land transfer mechanisms social security should be enhanced for economically vulnerable groups affected by land abandonment, and agricultural technology upgrades should be promoted through initiatives such as the transition of science and technology into rural areas. Farmers engaged in land reclamation are provided with subsidies for improved crop varieties and agricultural machinery operation; rural migrant worker households that have abandoned cultivated land due to family financial hardships are prioritarily included in the coverage of support measures such as rural minimum living security and temporary assistance, thereby reducing their land reclamation costs.

Although this study reveals the influencing factors and differential characteristics of rural migrant workers’ contracted land disposal based on nationwide large-sample data, it still has obvious limitations: the study adopts cross-sectional data for static analysis, which fails to track the dynamic evolution process of contracted land disposal methods and reflect the long-term effects of exogenous policy shocks; some key variables such as “difficulties in hometown” and “self-reported health status” rely on subjective evaluation based on single items, leading to insufficient measurement accuracy. In addition, meso-level variables such as the level of land transfer services provided by village collectives and the intensity of local policies are not included in the analysis, resulting in an inadequate discussion on the interaction mechanism between individual decision-making and institutional environments; although the sample covers all 31 provinces in China, it does not conduct special analysis on such subgroups as new-generation rural migrant workers, high-skilled rural migrant workers and migrant workers in different industries, and inadequately explores the differentiated origins of disposal behaviors of specific groups.

Future research can further deepen and expand the study in response to the above limitations: panel data can be used to track the dynamic changes of contracted land disposal of the same group, and a causal identification framework can be constructed by combining quantitative methods such as the Difference-in-Differences (DID) method and Propensity Score Matching (PSM) to accurately evaluate the long-term effects of policies such as rural land titling and national overall planning of basic medical insurance, so as to clarify the influence mechanism of exogenous shocks on rural migrant workers’ land disposal decisions; meso-level variables such as the service level of village collectives and the intensity of local policies should be introduced to explore the impact of supply–demand mismatch on land disposal efficiency from the dual perspectives of the supply side and the demand side, so as to improve the multi-level analytical framework; the research can focus on subgroups including new-generation and older-generation rural migrant workers, inter-provincial and intra-provincial migrant workers, and migrant workers in the Eastern, Central and Western regions of China, and conduct comparative studies combined with industrial differences to explore the core demands and obstacles of disposal behaviors of various groups, thus expanding the theoretical boundary and practical value of the research.