Based on the value of plant industry output, labor force and agricultural means of production’s input data per hm², taking cultivated land use efficiency as investigated subject, this paper studied cultivated land use efficiency value of each province per year and its spatial and temporal variation using stochastic frontier production function method. The results showed that: 1) At the present stage, agricultural means of production’s input is dominating production mode in China’s cultivated land use. The cultivated land output’s improvement in China mainly relies on chemical fertilizer increase, the increased mechanization level has little influence. 2) China’s overall level of land use efficiency is low, cultivated land actual output has a great difference to potential output under existing input level. In recent 20 years, cultivated land use efficiency was improved, but its speed slowed gradually. It indicated that agriculture’s high yield’s maintenance required plentiful material input. Continued increase in material input has little significance to improve cultivated land use efficiency. 3) Inter-provincial land use efficiency has a significant difference and aggregate in the eastern, central and western regions. Differences exist with the different regional economic development, the highest average efficiency of cultivated land lies in the eastern and central regions has the least efficiency. 4) In the past 20 years, although the national cultivated land use efficiency has signs of convergence, but the global characteristics of β-convergence is not significant. The eastern, central and western regions show the stronger β-convergence characteristics. From the steady state value of the regional convergence, the eastern and western regions are very close, and shown that the western is less than the eastern, the central is less than the western, which means that with the time passing, each of China’s three economic zones will converge to a higher land use efficiency.