Land use change has been one of the most important drivers to significantly influence the provision of ecosystem services. Impacts of land use change on ecosystem services have been one focus of ecology research and attracted more and more attentions from domestic and international. However,impacts of cropland change on ecosystem services in eastern coastal developed regions of China are still not clear, which limits comprehensive understanding of the mechanism between land use change and ecosystem services. In this paper, the Taihu Lake Basin was chosen as the study area due to its representativeness of rapid economic development and commodity grain base in this area. Based on remote sensing data and the statistics, spatial and temporal change of cropland and its impacts on ecosystem services were carried out in the Taihu Lake Basin. Three key ecosystem services—gain production, carbon sequestration and water conservation were selected to examine what extent and how cropland change on eco-logical services. The results showed that: 1) The area of cropland decreased significantly over the past 25 years in the Taihu Lake Basin, mainly transforming into urban and built-up areas. A small reduction of cropland with 1346.84 km² in 1985-2000, mainly concentrated in Shanghai Municipality and Jiangsu Province. While cropland area decreased by 4317.46 km² in 2000- 2010, which presented an obvious degraded trend at the county-level. 2) Ecosystem services in the Taihu Lake Basin in 1985-2010 presented an obvious degraded trend. Rice and oil production decreased by 39.6% and 56.6%, respectively, only wheat production presented a very small increment. Regulating function decreased significantly, of which soil carbon storage obviously decreased, but little effect on water conservation capacity. We propose to strengthen the protection of cropland to coordinate the balance between cropland protection, economic development and ecological services in the Taihu Lake Basin, which is beneficial for reducing pressure on degradation of ecosystem services for cropland decrease.