Against the backdrop of the “dual carbon” goals, the green credit policy, as a significant financial innovation practice in China, embodies the development concept of “achieving economic prosperity while ensuring environmental sustainability”, playing a crucial role in guiding enterprises towards green development. Existing studies on the impact of the green credit policy on heavy polluting enterprises mainly explore pollution control, green innovation, financing constraints, environmental information disclosure, etc. However, attention to the transformation pressure faced by heavy polluting enterprises under the background of the green credit policy is insufficient, and there is little research on examining these issues from the perspective of tax burden pressure and the resulting tax burden perception. This paper, taking the issuance of the Green Credit Guidelines in 2012 as a quasi-natural experiment, examines the impact of the green credit policy on the tax stickiness of heavy polluting enterprises from the perspective of the tax shield effect. The research finds that the implementation of the green credit policy significantly exacerbates the tax stickiness of heavy polluting enterprises, imposing greater transformation pressure on them, thereby compelling enterprises to transition from high-pollution and high-energy consumption to green production. Furthermore, based on the mechanism test results of the tax-saving effect of tax shield , it is demonstrated that the green credit policy mainly affects the tax stickiness of heavy polluting enterprises by weakening the tax-saving effect of debt shields rather than non-debt shields. Moreover, green credit policy has a stronger effect on the tax stickiness of enterprises in several subsample groups, including the group with non-state-owned enterprises, the group with enterprises in the growth stage of their life cycle, and the group with strong local tax collection and management. Compared with the existing studies, this paper mainly expands on the following three aspects. Firstly, based on the perspective of tax burden stickiness, this paper empirically tests the impact of green credit policy on the tax burden pain and transition pressure of heavy polluting enterprises, providing new ideas and insights for understanding the implementation effect of green credit policy. Secondly, this paper extends the relevant research of tax burden stickiness to the field of green economy and makes a beneficial expansion and supplement to the research of tax burden stickiness. Thirdly, this paper further examines the mechanism and path of green credit policy affecting the tax burden stickiness of heavy polluting enterprises from the tax saving effect of tax shield, providing new empirical evidence for an in-depth understanding of how green credit policy exerts governance transformation effect on heavy polluting enterprises. This study provides an explanation from the perspective of tax stickiness for a deeper understanding of the impact of the green credit policy on the transformation pressure of heavy polluting enterprises, offering new empirical evidence for further optimizing and improving the green credit policy and accelerating the realization of China’s “dual carbon” strategic goals. At the same time, the research findings reveal the widespread existence of the tax stickiness phenomenon in China, indicating that the road to tax reduction and fee reduction in China is still long and arduous, and it is necessary to effectively alleviate enterprise tax burden perception through various means and methods.