Digital village construction brings new growth points for rural economic development. This paper merges the Index of Digital Rural County with the China Rural Revitalization Survey (CRRS) database, systematically explores the impact of digital village construction on rural households’ income from the micro angle of farmers, and the mechanism between the two from the perspective of industrial revitalization. The results show that digital village construction has a significant income-enhancing effect. Mechanism testing reveals that digital village construction not only expands the scale of rural industries, but also helps optimize the allocation of rural factor resources, which jointly promotes the revitalization of rural industries and boosts the income of rural households. Further, from the perspective of income structure, this paper finds that digital village construction mainly increases the non-agricultural income of rural households, which verifies that digital village construction broadens the income channels of rural households by driving the revitalization of rural industries. Finally, this paper discusses the differences in the income-enhancing role of digital villages from the perspectives of rural household business types and digital divide, and finds that pure non-agricultural households and pure agricultural households are more likely to benefit from digital village construction, while the digital divide will reduce the inclusiveness of digital village construction.

This paper has the following contributions: First, it not only makes up for the inadequacy of the existing literature that only discusses a certain part of digital village construction, but also complements the research on the micro effect of digital village construction. Second, it takes advantage of micro data to analyze the mechanism of digital village construction to enhance rural households’ income from the perspective of industrial revitalization, supplementing the empirical evidence of increased income opportunities for farmers and making up for the lack of exploration of micro-mechanisms related to industrial revitalization. Third, it provides a more detailed discussion of the income-enhancing role of digital villages in the analysis of the income structure of rural households and the heterogeneity of rural household business types, offering direct evidence at the micro level from the perspectives of land transfer and choice of business types for explaining the changes in various types of rural households’ income in the context of digital village construction, and enriching the literature on the impact of land transfer and part-time business on rural households’ income.