Defining the distance effect of rural residents’ willingness to participate in watershed ecological restoration is an important prerequisite for improving the accuracy of restoration benefits evaluation and fully understanding public demands. Taking 390 rural residents in the Shiyang River Basin as the research object and obtaining the ecological restoration willingness by means of the choice experiment method, the distance effect in different reaches of the river basin were tested by group estimation and by including the distance variables in the multinomial logit (MNL) model, respectively. The results show that: (1) The key areas of ecological restoration that are of concern to rural residents in different sections of the river basin differ, showing significant regional effects; (2) Different from the “distance decay” pattern found in previous studies, the willingness to participate in ecological restoration of the rural residents in the middle reaches of the Shiyang River Basin increased with the distance from the river bank and the reservoir, and the willingness to participate in ecological restoration of the downstream rural residents increased with the distance from the reservoir, showing the pattern of “distance increase.” Accordingly, we recommend that: (1) Incorporate the distance effect into the methodological system of benefits evaluation of ecological restoration projects to improve the accuracy of evaluation ; (2) The design of ecological restoration policies should give more consideration to public opinions and obtain public support; (3) The objects of ecological publicity and education can be further subdivided based on the distance effect. The purpose of this study is to provide a more targeted basis for the formulation of relevant policies on ecological restoration of inland river basins.