In view of the most prominent economic characteristics of the resource-based cities, this paper analyzes the impact of environmental regulation on the employment of resource-based cities from the perspective of economic structure. This paper finds that the single industrial structure and the ownership structure of more state ownership are difficult to play the employment creation effect of environmental regulation. The results show that there are obvious threshold characteristics in the employment effect of environmental regulation in resource-based cities by using the panel data of 282 cities in China from 2005 to 2016, including 112 resource-based cities and 170 non-resource-based cities. When the industrial structure surpasses the threshold, environmental regulation changes from promoting to restraining the employment of resource-based cities, on the contrary, it changes from restraining to promoting for non-resource-based cities. When crossing the threshold value of ownership structure, environmental regulation will have a negative impact on employment rate in both resource-based and non-resource-based cities. In the background of speeding up the transformation and development of resource-based cities, it is an important way to solve the problem of reemployment of resources-based cities by optimizing the replacement industry, making the second industry strong and reducing the investment proportion of the state-owned enterprises.