Pine wilt disease (PWD) cause by pine wood nematodes (PWN, Bursaphelenchus xylophilus) is an epidemic forest disease that seriously threatens the world’s forest resources and human ecological environment. Predicting the potential geographical distribution of PWD in China under climate change and studying the impact of climate change on the distribution of PWD using the MaxEnt model can provide a basis for high - efficiency quarantine, supervision, and timely prevention and control. In our study, the ENMeval data package was used to optimize the parameter setting of the MaxEnt model based on 647 geographical distribution locations of PWD and seven climate factors, the potential distribution areas of PWD under current and future climate conditions (2050s, 2070s) were simulated and predicted, and the dominant environmental factors affecting the geographical distribution of PWD were analyzed. The results showed that the value of AICc of the Akaike information criterion was 0, and the prediction accuracy was good when the feature combination (FC) was LQHPT and the regularization multiplier (RM) was 0.5. The results showed that the main climate factors affecting the distribution of PWD were temperature (max temperature of warmest month (bio5), mean temperature of driest quarter (bio9), rainfall (coefficient of variation of precipitation seasonality (bio14) and precipitation of wettest quarter (bio16). The prediction results of the MaxEnt model showed that the area of the total suitable habitat and highly suitable habitat will expand significantly in 2050 and 2070, and the potential distribution of PWD will tend to spread to high latitude and altitude.