Abstract: Land renting is highly associated with farmers’ life. Based on the survey data of rice farmers in the Jianghan Plain of Hubei province, this paper introduced instrumental variables and applied the IV-oprobit model to control certain endogeneities to examine the impacts of land renting on farmers’ life satisfaction. The results found that when controlling the income level, land renting does not directly affect farmers’ life satisfaction, but it could indirectly improve life satisfaction by increasing agricultural income. To make further analyses, we divided the farmers into four groups according to their per capita net income from low to high, which are 0%-25%, 25%-50%, 50%-75% and 75%-100%.The results of stratified research showed that, the subjective welfare brought by land renting cannot be ignored especially for the farmers with lower income. Among the farmers in the lowest-income group, which is 0%-25%, the probability of feeling “very satisfied” will increase by 14.4% if the famer rent land from others. Moreover, for those who are in the income group of 25%-50%, farmers renting land have a higher chance, which is 28.4%, to be “very satisfied” with their life. However, land renting can also significantly decrease the life satisfaction of high-income farmers. Our research indicates that, land renting can improve farmers’ life satisfaction by exerting income effect and psychological effect as well. This result has a strong empirical significance for policies design particularly aiming at enhancing the welfare of poor farmers. In addition, this research also found that other driving factors such as the farmers’ health status, the purchase of real estate in the county town, the purchase of cars and washing machines, and the type of housing have significant impacts on farmers’ life satisfaction. The possible explanation is that they might affect life satisfaction by benefiting their lives or improving agricultural productivity. Finally, the results were discussed based on the perspective of improving the welfare of low-income farmers and some prospects for future research were put forward as well.