Urban-rural integrated development is a key initiative to crack the urban-rural dual structure and promote coordinated regional development, but it still faces challenges such as the uneven distribution of urban and rural resources, excessive infrastructure gaps and poor factor flows. How to promote high-quality integrated development of urban and rural areas has become a realistic problem that needs to be solved urgently in the construction of Chinese-style modernization. The essence of new quality productivity is advanced productivity, and its formation and development will profoundly reshape urban-rural relations and have an important impact on urban-rural integrated development. It is of great significance to explore the realistic path of new quality productivity to help urban-rural integrated development and to realize high-quality economic development. The article constructs a municipal new quality productivity evaluation index system covering three dimensions of scientific and technological productivity, green productivity and digital productivity, and utilizes the entropy method to measure the level of new quality productivity of 275 cities in China from 2011 to 2021, and examines the impact of new quality productivity on urban-rural integrated development and its mechanism. It is found that new quality productivity can significantly promote the development of urban-rural integration, and this conclusion still holds after the endogeneity test and a series of robustness tests. Mechanism analysis shows that new quality productivity can promote urban-rural integrated development through two important channels, namely, enhancing employment quality and improving entrepreneurial vitality. Threshold regression results show that under the threshold conditions of efficient market and active government, the impact of new quality productivity on urban-rural integrated development is characterized by positive and increasing marginal effects. Further analysis reveals that the effect of new quality productivity on urban-rural integration is more significant in the eastern region. Accordingly, we propose the following policy recommendations: accelerate the development of new quality productivity and pay attention to the powerful role of new quality productivity in urban-rural integrated development; explore multi-dimensional urban-rural integrated development driving paths to maximize the activation of the development potential of new quality productivity; give full play to the roles of effective market and active government to create a favorable development environment for new quality productivity; follow the comparative advantages of the regions, and implement differentiated development strategy of new quality productivity in accordance with local conditions.