Agricultural producer service (APS) plays a crucial role in the sustainable development of modern agriculture. Enhancing the stability of contracts between farmers and APS is the key to promoting the high-quality development of the latter. This research aimed to explore the decision-making and moderator effects of transaction costs, service satisfaction, and the stability of APS contracts by constructing a theoretical framework. Based on survey data from 893 farmers in Northeast China’s black soil area, we employed the Mvprobit model to examine the relationship between transaction costs, service satisfaction, and contract stability. The key findings are as follows: Firstly, transaction costs have a dual impact on contract stability in agricultural productive services, acting as both inhibitors and promoters. Higher information and execution costs reduce farmers’ willingness to maintain current cooperative relationships, while higher negotiation costs make farmers more inclined to stick with the status quo. Secondly, farmers’ satisfaction with services positively moderates the influence of transaction costs on contract stability, with highly satisfied farmers being more affected than those with lower satisfaction levels. Lastly, farmers’ personal, family, and social characteristics all shape their preferences during the formation process. To mitigate cooperation risks and bolster cooperation contract stability, this study suggests that the government implement supervision and incentives to reduce transaction costs for farmers when procuring services and enhance the efficiency of farmer–service provider connections.

Agricultural productive services (APS) play an important role in improving agricultural efficiency and ensuring food security. Existing studies have widely recognized that labor scarcity induced by rural labor transfer stimulates farmers’ demand for APS and promotes the expansion of agricultural service markets. Yet non-farm employment in developing countries is often characterized by instability, temporariness, and informality, which may generate volatile service demand and undermine the sustainable provision of APS. Based on survey data from 684 maize-producing households in China, this study constructs a multidimensional index of non-farm employment quality and investigates how it influences APS adoption intensity and transaction stability. Our results confirm that improvements in non-farm employment quality significantly increase APS adoption intensity, and the findings remain stable under alternative measurements and estimation methods. Mechanism analysis reveals that higher employment quality promotes APS adoption intensity by reducing farmers’ risk perception, while this effect is moderated by social capital. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the positive effect of non-farm employment quality is concentrated among growth-stage households, lower-land-fragmentation households, small-scale households, and single-type employment households. Further analysis indicates that higher employment quality contributes to more stable and long-term contractual relationships between farmers and service providers. By highlighting the importance of non-farm employment quality in stabilizing agricultural service demand and fostering stable transaction relationships, this study contributes to ongoing discussions on rural labor transformation and the sustainable development of APS markets under smallholder farming systems in developing countries.