Understanding and analyzing human-land relationships at the county level was fundamental for land use planning and served as a prerequisite for achieving balanced eco-economic development. This paper presented a framework for human-land relationship cognition, based on the core elements of people and land, with "3 basic characteristics, 3 evaluations, and 5 typical patterns." By integrating multi-source data-such as population structure, land use, landscape indices, meteorological data, and pollutants-and using spatial analysis techniques like Fragstats, coupling coordination degree, and offset-sharing models, a comprehensive method for quantifying human-land relationships was developed. An empirical study was conducted on 252 counties in the upper and middle reaches of the Yellow River. The results showed that: ①The strength of human-land correlation decreased from southeast to northwest. The structural analysis indicated that most counties had mismatched per capita life, production, and ecological resource holdings, with only a few counties in northern Inner Mongolia showing high values across all three categories. Regarding two-dimensional spatial characteristics, pronounced spatial differentiation in the fragmentation index was observed among counties, with the degree of spatial fragmentation intensifying progressively from west to east and from peripheral areas toward the central region. The average fragmentation index across the 252 sample counties was 4.47. In terms of three-dimensional spatial characteristics, urban development intensity was greater in the southern and southeastern counties than in the northern counties, which in turn was higher than in the western areas. This manifested a gradient differentiation characteristic of "stronger in the southeast and weaker in the northwest".②The analysis revealed a generally low coupling degree of human-land relationships across counties in the study area, decreasing from east to west. Only 0.3% of counties demonstrated a production-living coupling degree ≥0.66, while the majority (62%) exhibited moderate coupling levels between 0.33 and 0.65. The coordination degree was higher in the north and lower in the south, with highly coordinated counties clustered. Variability was more pronounced in the east than in the west, with 39%, 62%, and 50.3% of counties showing inconsistent changes in living, production, and ecological land use. ③Significant differences existed in the human-land relationship patterns of production, living, and ecological land uses within the same county, that is, the human-land relationships in the study area manifested diversified spatial patterns across functional dimensions, showing a structural mismatch of "living land aggregation-production and ecology dispersion". This study laid a scientific foundation for urban-rural settlement patterns, industrial system layout, and land use control in county-level territorial spatial planning.