Smallholder family management is still the main form of agricultural management at present, and it is common for one family to manage more than one piece of land. Farmland right confirmation can affect farmland use efficiency by influencing farmers’ input decisions and land transfer decisions. Therefore, the exploration of the impact of farmland right confirmation on the maximum land utilization efficiency of farmers has important practical significance. However, the existing literature lacks research on this topic. This paper argues that affecting farmers’ land transfer behavior is one of the main ways that farmland rights confirmation affects land-use efficiency. From the perspective of this path alone, the confirmation of farmland rights should not only promote the transfer of land, but also centralize the farmland to efficient agricultural producers and operators, and improve the dispersed management status of farmers, so as to significantly improve the utilization efficiency of farmland. However, in reality, there may be a variety of factors that hinder this path, resulting in the policy effect of farmland rights confirmation not being fully realized. Based on 1,058 questionnaires from a sample of 297 villages in Jilin, Jiangsu, and Sichuan provinces in 2019, analysis using the DEA-Tobit model and the mediating effects model showed that compared with farmers without the confirmation of farmland rights, the comprehensive technical efficiency and pure technical efficiency of the maximum land use of the confirmed farmers were lower, indicating that the confirmation of farmland rights in the sample villages at that time has not effectively promoted the improvement of farmland use efficiency, and may even have the opposite effect; compared with the farmers without the confirmation of farmland rights, the farmers with confirmation have a higher probability of inward transferring after the confirmed ownership, but the maximum land area is smaller. The farmers with inward transferring have higher comprehensive technical efficiency and pure technical efficiency of the maximum land use than those without inward transferring and those with a larger land area than those with a smaller land area. It is shown that the land transfer has a masking effect and the maximum land area has a mediating effect in the process of farmland rights confirmation affecting the farmland use efficiency. It can be seen that the confirmation of farmland rights improves the probability of inward transferring for farmers with confirmed farmland rights. Although the inward transferring of land can weaken the negative correlation between the confirmation of farmland rights and the comprehensive and pure technical efficiency of farmers’ maximum land use to a certain extent, it does not increase the area of the maximum land. The resulting intensified management dispersion may be one of the reasons why the maximum land-use efficiency of farmers with the right confirmation is lower than that of the farmers without confirmation.Compared with the existing literature, this paper conducted an in-depth study on the land transfer path of farmland right confirmation affecting farmland use efficiency, conducted an empirical analysis on the maximum land-use efficiency of farmers, deepened the research on the policy effect of farmland right confirmation, and refined the research on the influencing factors of farmland use efficiency. This study shows that in addition to continuing the reform of the “separation of the three rights” of farmland and continuing the work of “looking back” on the registration and certification of farmland rights, we should also remove other obstacles to the transfer of farmland, strengthen the guidance of the transfer of farmland and the improvement of farmland, so as to promote the concentration of farmland to highly efficient operators and strive to solve the problem of fragmented operation by farmers on multiple pieces of land, thereby enhancing the efficiency of farmland use more effectively.