Modern cities continue to expand in scale and function, but at the same time their own vulnerability is constantly exposed. Natural events and sudden social hot issues may become the opportunity for the rise and fall of cities, and then affect the vitality of urban development. How to enhance the city’s ability to resist risks and develop stably has become an urgent problem to achieve high-quality economic development. The emergence of new quality productivity will profoundly change the environment and conditions faced by urban economy, promote the deep reform of urban economic operation and development mode, and have an important impact on the cultivation of new urban business forms and industrial development. Based on the panel data of 230 cities in China from 2010 to 2021, this paper constructs a comprehensive evaluation index system of new quality productivity around the three components of productivity: labor, labor material and labor object, and adopts a fixed effect model to systematically investigate the impact of new quality productivity on urban economic resilience. It is found that, first of all, new quality productivity can effectively improve the resilience of urban economy, and this conclusion is still valid after the robustness test of endogenous processing, replacement variables, sample elimination and control of interaction effects. Secondly, new quality productivity affects the resilience of urban economy through the internal path of industrial structure upgrading effect, talent aggregation effect and technological innovation effect. Finally, the impact of new quality productivity on urban economic resilience is heterogeneous in terms of resource endowment, government participation and administrative level, and it is more obvious for non-resource-based cities with high government participation and high administrative level. The research conclusions provide a new perspective for exploring ways to improve urban economic resilience in theory, and provide empirical evidence for accelerating the development of new quality productivity in practice. The features and innovations of the article are mainly reflected in: First, taking new quality productivity as the starting point, this paper innovates into the impact of new quality productivity on urban economic resilience, providing new ideas for in-depth understanding and evaluation of economic effects caused by new quality productivity, and enriching and expanding academic discussions on new quality productivity in the field of urban economic resilience. It provides useful policy inspiration for exploring new ways to continuously promote new quality productivity and enhance urban economic resilience. Second, it reveals and elucidates the internal influence mechanism of new quality productivity and urban economic resilience, evaluates the action mechanism of new quality productivity to enhance urban economic resilience from the perspective of industrial structure upgrading effect, talent aggregation effect and technological innovation effect, and expands the research boundary of theoretical black box of urban economic resilience. At the same time, the heterogeneous effects of new quality productivity on urban economic resilience are also explored from the perspective of resource endowment, government participation and administrative level. Accordingly, the research conclusions help to form more specific policy targets, and have important practical guiding significance for accelerating the development of new quality productivity and improving urban economic resilience