Policies aimed at improving tenure security through the provision of rural land contracts and land certificates have been implemented over the years by the Chinese government in rural areas. To what extent these policies have promoted the development of the land lease market is still not clear, so we try to figure out the effect of these policies on land rental activities in the study. Based on Deininger and Jin's (2005) household model, a theoretical model is developed to consider the role of land tenure arrangements in the land rental decisions of rural households. Our theoretical strategy suggests that land tenure insecurity will bring additional transaction costs, reduce the number of farmers involved in land transfer, and then further hinder the development of the land lease market. By using a recent and nationwide dataset in rural China, this paper provides a fresh view to review and clarify how effective the government's documentation and registration of land rights are to rural households' decisions on participating in land rental market. Our regression results suggest that when rural households signed a land contract with the village collective, the possession of rural land contract can positively affect not only rural households' decision on renting out cultivated land through land lease market, but also the leased area and lease rate. Hence, increasing tenure security can contribute to the expansion and improvement of land rental market in rural China and the local government need to play a more active role in the process of implementing relevant laws to improving farmers' tenure security. Keywords: land tenure security, land tiling reform, rural land contract, land rental market. rural household decision, China