The spatiotemporal pattern of land use is an important representation of the interaction between human and nature. Study on the spatial-temporal pattern of land use and its driving factors in the Yellow River Basin and to clarify land-use conversion as well as the spatial-temporal variation of cultivated land, ecological land and urban-rural construction land, which can provide some reference for the planning and implementation of the national strategy of ecological protection and high-quality development of the Yellow River Basin. Based on the transfer matrix of land use types and spatial autocorrelation, the study explored the land use in the Yellow River Basin provinces from 1970 to 2015 by using land use data of seven periods from multiple scales of city cluster, province, city, and county. The results show that: (1) The proportion of ecological land and arable land in the Yellow River Basin is 79.04% and 18.64% respectively on average, indicating that ecological protection and food production are two main functions there; (2) The urban-rural construction land proportion increases year by year, and urban agglomeration region is the main space of construction land expansion; (3) Moran’s I of arable, ecological, urban-rural construction land of the Yellow River Basin provinces was more than 0.75 in different years and showed a strong positive spatial agglomeration effect and a pattern of concave type distribution ; (4) The expansion of urban-rural construction land is at the expense of arable land, and at the same time, part of rural land is gradually transformed into urban land, and the imbalance between human and land is increasingly prominent. (5) Population size and economic development are the core factors to promote land use change, and the performance of different spatial driving factors is inconsistent. There will not appear large-scale expansion of urban and rural construction land with the economic development in Shandong and Henan provinces located in the lower reaches of the Yellow River.