The grassland ecological compensation policy is an important measure to restore degraded grasslands, build an ecological security barrier, improve living standards of herders, as well as promote social and economic development. The pastoral grassland ecological compensation policy was implemented in 2011 in China. Research on herders' satisfaction with the policy and its influencing factors is helpful to the improvement of the policy, and thus promotes the performance of compensation in China. Five hundred herders were selected from Gannan, Sunan, and Tianzhu counties in Gansu Province. Using a combination of questionnaires and in-depth interviews, employing an ordered logit model, this study analyzed herders' satisfaction with the grassland eco-compensation policy and investigated the impact factors on herders' satisfaction from the perspective of their socio-economic characteristics, and attitude towards living conditions and social welfare, as well as their assessment of the relative importance of the grazing environment and economic benefits. The descriptive statistical results revealed large differences in the grassland eco-compensation subsidy and family income among the three counties. Sixty percent of the herders supported the opinion that economic benefits and environmental protection were of equal importance. Over one-third of the herders were unsatisfied with pro-poor policies and the minimum subsistence policy. The percentage of the grassland ecological subsidy income to the total family income of herders has exceeded 25%. The ordered logit regression results demonstrated that the factors affecting herders' satisfaction with the grassland ecological compensation policy involved the herder's years of academic education, number of livestock raised, changes in the weight of livestock, amount of subsidy obtained from the government, attitude towards the relative importance of grassland environment and economic benefits, as well as the evaluation of social welfare. Specifically, herders' educational background and the number of livestock negatively affected their degree of satisfaction with the grassland eco-compensation policy. However, the amount of subsidy and the changes in the weight of livestock had statistical and positive relationships with the degree of herders' satisfaction with the policy. Moreover, the higher the satisfaction with social welfare, the more satisfaction herders had for the eco-compensation policy. From a policy perspective, measures of enhancing the educational level of herders to change their traditional grazing concepts, improving poor herdsmen's living standards to better the social welfare of pastoralists, optimizing the grassland eco-compensation policy, and constructing a monitoring system for the policy, could be useful for further improvement of the grassland eco-compensation policy and thus aid in its effective implementation.