Abstract Building livable cities has been an important goal for new urbanization in China. Thus, understanding residents' satisfaction with urban livability in China and its determinants is beneficial for urban planning and policy making regarding livable cities construction. However, scientific evidence on satisfaction with urban livability towards Chinese cities is still lacking. Drawing on large-scale questionnaire surveys conducted in 2015 in 40 major cities in China, this paper aims to explore the characteristics of satisfaction with urban livability and the effect magnitude of its determinants using the geographical detector model. The results show that the respondents are just moderately satisfied with urban livability in China (2.996). With respect to the dimensions of urban livability, the respondents are relatively satisfied with the convenience of public facilities (3.118), the natural environment (3.057) and the sociocultural environment (3.056), while slightly dissatisfied with urban security (2.788), environmental health (2.912) and convenient transportation (2.929). The result of the geographical detector model further reveals that all the six dimensions of urban livability have significant and positive impacts upon overall satisfaction with urban livability, of which the natural environment, convenient transportation, environmental health are the greatest contributing factors. Moreover, individual socioeconomic attributes such as geographical location, type of housing, education, family size, age, hukou status, also exert significant effects on overall satisfaction with urban livability in descending order, but the magnitude of their effects is far less than that of the dimensions of urban livability.