Under the resource constraint of low per capita possession of cultivated land and the strategic requirements for ensuring national food security, the intensive and efficient use of cultivated land is an important topic for long-term research in China’s academic circles. It is an important prerequisite for exploring the moderate scale management of agricultural land. The calculation results of 147 county-level units in Northeast China by DEA method show that in the use efficiency evaluation results of cultivated land of county-level units, the mean values of comprehensive efficiency, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency were 0.674, 0.705 and 0.96, respectively, and the DEA effective units account for about 11%. The effective areas of pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency do not have a high level of superposition. To a certain extent, this also limits the improvement of overall efficiency. In view of the scale of family farmland management, counties and cities with an average per household possession of cultivated land of 1.71-2.13 ha can achieve both scale and efficiency through efficiency improvement.