Employment, as the largest livelihood project, is an important support for national economic development. The report of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China emphasizes the need to “improve the employment support system for key groups and establish a promotion mechanism that is conducive to more comprehensive and high-quality employment”. As a key employment group in China, migrant workers are not only crucial for stabilizing employment, but also have far-reaching significance for achieving common prosperity. With the rapid advancement of a new round of technological revolution, the development of digital rural areas based on emerging digital technologies has gradually become an important driving force for improving the welfare of rural residents and achieving rural revitalization. However, existing literature only focuses on the macroeconomic effects of digital rural development. There is little literature that systematically analyzes the impact of digital rural development on the employment quality of migrant workers at the micro individual level. Therefore, based on the matching data of the 2018 China Household Micro Survey and the Digital Rural Development Index at the county level, this article examines the impact of digital rural development on the employment quality of migrant workers and examines its mechanism of action. This study finds that the development of digital rural areas has a significant promoting effect on the employment quality of migrant workers, and as the level of digital rural development changes, its impact on the employment quality of migrant workers shows a U-shaped trend of first decreasing and then increasing. There is a significant heterogeneity in the development of digital rural areas for different groups of migrant workers, specifically manifested in the more significant promotion effect on female groups, married groups, middle-aged and young people, and higher education groups. The development of digital rural areas mainly indirectly improves the employment quality of migrant workers through the effects of expanding information channels, matching people with positions, and enhancing social trust; Further research has found that the promotion effect of digital rural development on employment quality is still constrained by the digital "access" gap. Compared with previous literature, this article mainly expands as follows: firstly, it explores the impact of digital rural development on the employment quality of migrant workers and expands the research on the economic effects of digital rural areas. Secondly, compared with the existing literature that analyzes from macro perspectives such as provincial and prefecture-level cities, this article matches the 2018 CFPS database with the county-level Digital Rural Index to examine the impact of digital rural areas on employment quality at the county level, overcoming the limitations of macro-level data to a certain extent. Thirdly, this article explores the impact of digital rural development on the employment quality of migrant workers through three paths: expanding information channels, matching people and positions, and enhancing social trust. This study reveals the inherent logic between the development of digital rural areas and the improvement of employment quality for migrant workers, providing theoretical support for digital empowerment of rural revitalization. To further unleash the dividends of digital rural development, it is necessary to strengthen the construction of rural digital infrastructure, improve the breadth of rural internet coverage, and continuously optimize the institutional mechanisms of digital rural construction, so as to promote the inclusivity and accessibility of digital rural development.