Abstract: Understanding the impact of land transfer on the economic radiation of urban agglomerations and its formation mechanism, will help scientifically coordinate land planning, effectively regulate the land market, enhance the economic radiation of urban agglomerations, and promote the coordinated development of urban economy. This paper taking 36 cities in Hubei, Hunan and Jiangxi provinces as research areas, using the urban panel data from 2003 to 2016, empirically tested the impact of land transfer on the economic radiation of the urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River and its formation mechanism with an extended spatial Dubin model. The results showed that: (1) The land transfer has little effect on the economic radiation of the urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River.Only the central city land transfer has a significant direct spatial effect on the economic radiation of urban agglomerations, while the direct spatial effects of central cities and the indirect spatial effects of non-central cities and non-central cities are not significant; (2) The promotion of land transfer to the economic radiation mainly relies on infrastructure investment, technical efficiency and provincial financial transfer payment mechanism, while enterprise investment and labor mechanism have not formed. The reason is that land transfer has no significant effect on enterprise investment and labor, and there is no significant diffusion effect on enterprise investment, while labor has a backwash effect; (3) To promot the economic radiation of urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River by land transfer, it is necessary to strengthen the industrial chain invitation of investment in urban co-operation, to accelerating the citizenization of agricultural transfer population.