Climate change affects the geographical distribution of plant species, and it is of great significance to predict the potential suitable areas of plant species for understanding their geographical distribution characteristics and exerting their ecological and economic values. In this study, 160 recorded occurrences and 22 environmental factors were used to predict the potential suitable areas of Quercus sect. Heterobalanus based on the MaxEnt model optimized by using ENMeval package in R 4.1.1 to adjust regularization multiplier (RM) and feature combination (FC), as well as on ArcGIS software. We probed main environmental factors affecting its geographical distribution. In addition, we predicted the spatial distribution pattern of potential suitable areas and the trend of centroid change in the Last interglacial (LIG), the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), the Middle Holocene (MH), at present, as well as in future 2041-2060 (2050) and 2061-2080 (2070) under three different CO₂ emission paths. The results showed that the parameters of the optimal model were RM=2.5, FC=LQHPT, the model complexity and overfitting were the lowest, but the prediction accuracy of the model was extremely high (AUC=0.960±0.15). Based on the contribution rate of Jackknife method, replacement contribution rate and single factor response curve, the main environmental factors affecting its geographical distribution were seasonal variation coefficient of air temperature (bio4), elevation (dem), annual precipitation (bio12), and isothermality(bio3). And their suitable ranges were 435-625 (bio4), 1792-3978m (dem), 670-1050mm (bio12) and 41.5-50.3 (bio13), respectively. The cumulative contribution rate of these four factors was as high as 81.6%. In general, temperature was the most important environmental factor affecting the plants of Quercus sect. Heterobalanus. Under the current climate conditions, the total suitable area of Quercus sect. Heterobalanus was 62.37×10⁴km² and the high suitable area was 10.47×10⁴km², accounting for 16.79% of the total suitable area. It was distributed in Hengduan Mountain area of Sichuan Province and Yunnan Province, northern part of Middle Yunnan Plateau, southeast Tibet and part of western Guizhou Province. The suitable area of Quercus sect. Heterobalanus varied greatly in different times. And the currently potential suitable area was the smallest and most fragmented, which might be caused by climate change and human impacts. The potential distribution area would increase in the future, but the area under RCP 8.5 would decline compared with that under other scenarios. The results indicated that global warming was adverse to the long-term growth of Quercus sect. Heterobalanus. At the same time, the centroid analysis showed that its distribution would trend toward low altitude and move toward south under future climate conditions.