Drought is one of the important factors affecting vegetation growth, so the study of vegetation response to drought at different time scales is of great significance. The standardized precipitation index (SPI), vegetation condition index (VCI) and fractional vegetation cover (FVC) at different time scales were calculated and the spatio-temporal change of vegetation and its response characteristics to multi-time scale meteorological droughts were analyzed based on the monthly precipitation and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data of the Hanjiang River Basin (HRB) from 1982 to 2019. The results showed that NDVI in the growing season of the HRB showed an upward trend and FVC was spatially higher in the west and lower in the east. With the increase of the time scale, the alternating frequency of dry and wet cycle decreased, indicating that the sensitivity of drought events to precipitation decreased. According to the drought trend, 37.62% and 62.38% of the regions showed an upward and downward trend respectively. From the perspective of drought frequency, high frequency drought events in each season were concentrated in the middle and east of the basin. At the annual scale, there was a negative correlation between NDVI and SPI-12 in most regions, 43.26% of the regions showing a positive correlation, which mainly distributed in the middle and southeast of the HRB. At the seasonal scale, the response of spring NDVI to SPI-3 was the most obvious, and 85.64% of the regions showed positive correlation. At the monthly scale, SPI-1 and SPI-3 had the most obvious influences on VCI in spring, whereas SPI-12 had a greater influence in autumn. Among the different land use types, grassland and arable land were highly correlated with SPI, indicating that they were less resistant to droughts.