Against the backdrop of high-quality economic development and the deep implementation of China’s strategy on developing a quality workforce， household investment in education has become the core channel for transforming household capital into human capital and driving the continuous release of the talent dividend. Meanwhile， China’s household leverage ratio has risen rapidly, and the contradiction between debt pressure and rigid educational investment has become increasingly prominent. Their interactive relationship directly affects the efficiency of human capital accumulation, educational equity, and household financial stability. Most existing studies focus on the impact of household leverage on aggregate consumption, rarely conduct in-depth analyses of its mechanism on educational investment, and generally overlook the comprehensive moderating effects of household economic, social, and cultural capital as well as multi-dimensional heterogeneity. Based on this, this paper constructs a pooled cross-sectional sample using data from the 2017 and 2019 China Household Finance Survey (CHFS), and adopts a fixed-effects model to examine the impact of household leverage on household educational investment, so as to provide empirical evidence for optimizing household financial decisions, improving public education policies, and preventing household debt risks. The empirical results show that, first, at the full-sample level, an increase in household leverage raises educational investment, and this conclusion remains robust after replacing the measurement of core variables, excluding childless and debt-free households, and addressing endogeneity by using regional average leverage as an instrumental variable; second, in terms of the moderating effect, the positive impact of household leverage on educational investment weakens as household capital increases, indicating that capital-abundant households can meet educational needs with their own resources and reduce reliance on debt financing; third, heterogeneity analysis reveals that households with lower debt diversification, those relying mainly on internal financing, those with three or more children, those with higher digitalization levels, and those located in the central and western regions as well as urban areas tend to increase educational investment more significantly when leverage rises; fourth, further discussion confirms an inverted U-shaped nonlinear relationship between household leverage and educational investment, where rising leverage encourages households to increase educational input under light financial pressure but reduces educational expenditure under excessive financial burden, suggesting that moderate leverage eases liquidity constraints and supports educational investment while financial stress caused by over-indebtedness significantly reduces educational spending. This paper puts forward suggestions from four perspectives: guiding households to make rational educational investment plans, improving the quality of public education resources, enhancing households’ capital accumulation capacity and diversified financing channels， and building a targeted educational support policy system. Focusing on the pathway of transforming household capital into human capital, it expands and empirically tests the theoretical framework of how household leverage affects educational investment. It highlights the heterogeneity of educational investment decisions under household leverage, providing a new perspective for understanding household educational investment decisions under economic pressure.