The dry bulk density of lake sediments is an important parameter in the calculation of lake carbon burial. However, past research records often lack dry bulk density data, making it necessary to estimate sediment dry bulk density using empirical relationships between organic carbon and dry bulk density for regional and global studies of lake carbon burial. Currently, the widely used TOC-DBD empirical relationships are based on other countries, and their reliability has not been validated in China. This paper establishes a new TOC-DBD empirical relationship based on the measured data of organic carbon and dry bulk density from 855 sediment samples of 32 lake sediment cores in the eastern plain and the Mongolian-Xinjiang plateau：DBD = 0.7191TOC_^-0.444. The comparative results show that our TOC-DBD empirical relationship significantly outperforms the currently widely used TOC-DBD empirical relationship in estimating the dry bulk density of lakes in the eastern plain and the Mongolian-Xinjiang plateau; furthermore, the estimated lake carbon burial rates based on our empirical relationship can reduce the error by 7% to 22%.