Abstract: Accurately assessing urban resilience and identifying core obstacle factors are of great significance to high-quality urban development.Taking the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) as the study area, this paper measured urban resilience from five dimensions: economic resilience, social resilience, institutional resilience, ecological resilience, and infrastructure resilience.This study revealed the spatiotemporal evolution characteristics of urban resilience from 2003 to 2021 by coupling the methods of spatial autocorrelation and time series clustering.The core obstacle factors were identified based on the obstacle degree model.The main results were as follows: (1) The urban resilience level of the YREB had increased year by year, and the growth trend could be divided into three stages: the germination period, the steady growth period, and the rapid improvement period.(2) The urban resilience levels in the upper, middle, and lower reaches had all shown a continuous upward trend.Among them, the average urban resilience in the lower reaches was always significantly higher than that in the middle and upper reaches, while the relative difference between the middle and upper reaches was small.(3) The urban resilience level of the YREB presented a spatial pattern of high at both ends and low in the middle, with significant positive spatial autocorrelation.The results of local spatial autocorrelation showed that the scope of the high-high agglomeration area in the Yangtze River Delta had shrunk, and the low-low agglomeration area in the upper reaches had gradually disappeared.(3) The urban resilience in the study area indicated four main evolution modes, namely, the continuous improvement type, the continuous decline type, first rise then fall type, and the fluctuating decline type.(4) Response infrastructure, industrial transformation, municipal infrastructure, and ecological environment were the main obstacles to improving urban resilience.Cities in the YREB should promote the steady improvement of urban resilience through cross-regional cooperation in urban industrial innovation, response infrastructure upgrading, and ecological restoration.