Herein, we report a homemade new Nd:YAG crystal rod that contains a gradient dopant of 0.39–0.80 at.% Nd3+ from end to end, achieving superior performance of a 2 kHz Nd:YAG pulse laser at 1064 nm. The optical-to-optical conversion efficiency reached 53.8%, and the maximum output power of the laser was 24.2 W, enhanced by 35.9% compared with a uniform crystal rod with the same total concentration of Nd3+. Significantly, our experiments revealed that the gradient concentration crystal produced a relatively even pumping distribution along the rod axis, greatly reducing the temperature gradient as well as having a smaller thermal effect. The pump and thermal distribution smoothing obviously improved the features of laser oscillation and output.