Reasonably delineating fiscal responsibilities and expenditure duties serves as the prerequisite and guarantee for the effective provision of public goods. This paper, grounded in the policy context of Chinas ongoing reform of fiscal responsibilities and expenditure duties, employs prefecturelevel city data from 2015 to 2022 and adopts the DifferenceinDifferences (DID) model with an intensity index to discuss and analyze the impact of the fiscal direct fund mechanism on the level of basic public services provision. The results indicate that, against the backdrop of the reform of fiscal responsibilities and expenditure duties, incorporating fiscal funds into the direct allocation mechanism can significantly enhance the level of basic public service provision at the prefecturelevel cities. Specifically, the higher the proportion of the central government’s expenditure responsibilities for shared fiscal responsibilities in the field of basic public services, the more funds are included in the direct allocation mechanism after policy implementation, resulting in a greater stimulatory effect on basic public service provision. From a regional perspective, the direct allocation mechanism for fiscal funds has a more pronounced effect on improving the level of basic public servise provision in regions with lower levels of economic development, relatively weaker fiscal selfsufficiency, and lower administrative levels. Further channel analysis confirms that the fiscal direct fund mechanism can promote the improvement of basic public service provision levels by strengthening supervision and enhancing fiscal transparency.