Abstract Technology advances are considered to be effective in reducing carbon emissions. However, studies show that the effect of such advances on reducing carbon emissions is not as effective as expected, owing to the existence of the rebound effect (RE). This paper proposes a new method integrating the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) production model and the sequential Malmquist-Luenberger (SML) index to calculate China's macro-carbon RE. An extended DEA production model is used to eliminate the impact of input scale, and the SML index is employed to avoid the phenomenon of technology regress. Results show that the carbon RE can be calculated more precisely. The new method is then applied to calculate carbon RE values from 30 Chinese provinces from 1996 to 2015, and results indicate that the carbon RE does indeed exist in China and that national average carbon RE values vary from 7.4% to 43.8%. Furthermore, both the backfire effect and the super conservation effect are evident in some provinces. Based upon the obtained results, certain policy implications are suggested to facilitate China in effectively implementing carbon emission reduction actions.