Cultivated land distribution on the basin scale spans a wide range, in order to explore the evolution of spatial and temporal patterns of cultivated land in basins, four major basins including the Yellow River, the Huaihe River, the Haihe River and the Yangtze River were studied based on the land use remote sensing monitoring data in 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2020. The transfer of cultivated land to other land use types, the migration of gravity center of cultivated land and cultivated land aggregation characteristics, as well as the phenomenon of water and dry land differentiation in the four major basins were analyzed by the land use transfer matrices, the center of gravity model and the kernel density approach. The results show that the area of cultivated land in the four major basins decreased from 1990 to 2020, among which the reduction rate of cultivated land in the Haihe River Basin was the biggest, accounting for 9.16%. Except for the center of gravity of cultivated land in the Haihe River Basin, which migrated to the southwest, that in the other three basins all migrated to the northeast, with the overall center of gravity migrating to the north, and the distance of the migration during 1990-2020 was 1.8, 5.9, and 5.1 km, respectively. The land use transfer were mainly found between forest, urban & rural land use and grasslands, except for some adjustments of the paddy fields and dryland in the four major river basins, and the transfer mainly occurred during the period of 2010-2020. During 1990-2020, the area of paddy fields in the Yellow River Basin decreased by 9.35%, and the area of dryland decreased by 4.91%; the area of paddy fields in the Huaihe River Basin increased by 3.51%, while the dryland decreased by 7.10%; the paddy fields and dryland in the Haihe River Basin decreased by 70.46% and 6.71%, respectively; and the reduction rate of paddy fields and dry land in the Yangtze River Basin was 8.15% and 1.72%, respectively. The four major basins are the arteries of the national water network, which is consistent with the scope of this study, and the research results can provide the necessary prerequisites for further research on the matching between cultivated land resources and the construction of water network.