Partial hydrogenation of benzene to cyclohexene is an important industrial process and features exceptional superiority to processes such as dehydration of cyclohexanol, dehydrogenation of cyclohexane, and the Birch reduction in terms of inexpensive feedstock, succinct reaction route and consequently, improved operational simplicity. In this work, the pore size effect on the partial hydrogenation of benzene to cyclohexene over the Ru-Zn/ZrO 2 catalysts was studied for the first time. Three ZrO 2 supports with the same tetragonal crystallographic form (t-ZrO 2 ) but different pore sizes were synthesized by the precipitation and the solvothermal methods. Using these ZrO 2 samples, the Ru-Zn/ZrO 2 catalysts were prepared by the deposition-precipitation method followed by reduction in ZnSO 4 •7H 2 O aqueous solution. The supports and catalysts were characterized by powder X-ray diffraction (XRD), N 2 physisorption, inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectroscopy (ICP-AES), CO chemisorption, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), X-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES), temperature-programmed reduction of H 2 (H 2 -TPR), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). It is identified that the Ru nanoparticles (NPs) on these catalysts had similar size and chemical state. In the partial hydrogenation of benzene to cyclohexene, a pronounced pore size effect of the catalyst was identified. With the increase in the pore size, while the turnover frequency (TOF) of benzene was essentially unchanged, the initial selectivity (S 0 ) to cyclohexene increased steadily. The Ru-Zn/ZrO 2 (11.7) catalyst with the ZrO 2 support having the pore size of 11.7 nm exhibited the highest S 0 (88%) and yield (54%) of cyclohexene. On the basis of the characterization results, the similarity in the TOFs of benzene on the