In China rural areas ,education can effectively improve farmers'o verall personal qualities and help them promote their productivity and income level as well .Besides ,education has strong spillover effect because the education that a farmer gets has a positive impact on other people around him/her . Despite a wide range of existing researches ,fewempirical analyses in recent years have been made of the rateof return toeducationfrom the perspectives of industry or gender withfirst-hand data .Incalculating educational spillover effect ,there are two difficulties ,one of which is that it is hard to set up an analytical framework of spillover effect of education in rural areas ,and the other oneis that it is hard to collect data related to the spillover effect of rural education .Based on the latest data from100 villages of 10 provinces across China ,this paper attempts to evaluate the educational returns of agriculture and non-agricultural industry and of male and female residents by applying the Mincer Earnings Function .In addition ,it tries to define and analyze the spillover effects from the perspectives of the same village and the same industryviaLucas Model of HumanCapital Spillover .The results show that education has great effect not only on farmers'income ,but also on the income of other groups related to farmers . (1) Education has greater impact on their non-agricultural income than agricultural income . Ceteris paribus ,a farmer will increase his non-agricultural income by5 .61% compared to4 .28% increment in his agricultural income if he receives one more year of education .(2) Men will gain higher rateof return to education than that of womenin rural areas ,whether it be agricultural or non-agricultural income .To a man ,each one-year further education received will increase his agricultural income and non-agricultural income by about4 .85% and7 .18% respectively .As far as awomanis concerned ,theeffect of education on her income is not significant . (3) There are significant spillover effects of education in rural areas . That one year of education added to all the farmers in the village will increase the average farmer's income by6 .21% .When added to all the farmers in this profession ,the average farmer's income will increase by8 .13% .The research highlights of this paper are the analysis of the return rate of education from the micro perspective by using first-hand data from July ,2010 to July ,2011 of rural household surveys in one hundred villages in ten provinces across China ,i .e . Heilongjiang ,Shandong ,Anhui ,Shanxi ,Sichuan ,Inner Mongolia ,Hainan ,Jiangxi ,Zhejiang and Guizhou . This paper also tries to obtain external evidence of education from different perspectives ,i .e . from the redefinition of rural groups and from the analysis of the effect of education levels of rural groups on their income ,in order to minimize wrong conclusions caused by inaccurate definitions of rural groups .