The implementation of environmental auditing standards has changed auditors’ external practice environment, requiring auditors to include enterprises’ environmental issues into the scope of financial statement auditing. Taking China’s A-share listed enterprises from 2004 to 2023 as the research sample, this paper empirically tests the impact of attention to environmental issues on audit fees. The results indicate that environmental auditing standards significantly increase the audit fees of national key monitored enterprises, and its underlying reason is that auditors need to bear higher risks and make more efforts to consider the impact of environmental issues on auditing. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the lower the green innovation level of national key monitored enterprises or the stronger the regional environmental law enforcement, the more significant the above impact. Further research shows that although the implementation of the standards increases the audit costs of national key monitored enterprises, it significantly improves the quality of auditing. In addition, the incremental effect of audit fees brought by green auditing is more significant when the number of national key monitored subsidiaries under listed companies is larger, or when listed companies belong to national key monitored enterprises in the categories of waste gas and wastewater. This paper not only helps the academic community to comprehensively understand the implementation effect of green-related auditing standards, but also emphasizes the importance of incorporating environmental issues into the scope of auditing, providing useful references for policymakers and corporate management.