to introduce a risk-adjusted profit productivity measure. We further decompose the measure into changes in allocative inefficiency, technical inefficiency, technology, and price effects. In order to compare profit performance and its sources in Chinese banks, we employ 43 Chinese banks from 2015 to 2019 as the sample. We find that all Chinese banks have a significant improvement in profit productivity, and their profit loss mainly results from technical decline. State-owned banks have better profit efficiency, but Chinese city banks have the highest profit productivity growth.The main contribution is that ownership cannot affect profit productivity but can function in production-related components, namely, changes in technical inefficiency and technology. 1 | INTRODUCTION China, including the banking industry and financial markets, has developed rapidly in the past few decades. Currently, the China Construction Bank and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China are the world's largest banks. It is well known that the banking industry exerts a great influence on the financial system. Moreover, the stability and development of the banking industry is crucial to the economic development of society. State-owned commercial banks (SCBs), stock-jointed commercial banks (JCBs), and city commercial banks (CCBs) are three main types of banks in China (Chen, 2020).SCBs, which can conduct business in all provinces of China, occupy a major share of the Chinese banking market. JCBs, which mostly conduct business in eastern China, occupy second place in the banking market. CCBs limit their business to a certain level of local cities or provinces. Therefore, it will be interesting to investigate the performance differences among these three types of banks.