The comprehensive advancement of rural revitalization is a significant contemporary issue that cannot be achieved without financial support. As a new form of financial development in the digital economy era, digital inclusive finance, with its advantages of wide coverage, low cost, and sustainability, is expected to consolidate and expand the achievements of poverty alleviation and comprehensively promote rural revitalization. Existing studies on the relationship between digital inclusive finance and rural revitalization have mostly focused on the provincial level, while county areas, as the main battleground for the comprehensive advancement of rural revitalization, have rarely been examined from a county-level perspective. This paper constructs an evaluation index system for rural revitalization at the county level and uses panel data from 1,615 counties in China from 2014 to 2022 to systematically examine the impact and mechanism of digital inclusive finance on rural revitalization. The results show that digital inclusive finance can innovate financial service models, activate rural development vitality, and effectively promote rural revitalization. This conclusion remains valid after multiple robustness tests. Digital inclusive finance mainly promotes rural revitalization through the effects of entity cultivation, industrial structure upgrading, and the expansion of consumer markets. Further discussions reveal that different dimensions of digital inclusive finance can all promote rural revitalization, with the depth of use having the most significant effect. The promoting effect of digital inclusive finance on rural revitalization exists in counties with different levels of digital infrastructure and different levels of rural residents’ education, but the promotion effect is more fully played in counties with higher levels of digital infrastructure and higher levels of rural residents’ education. Compared with previous literature, this paper makes two extensions: First, unlike most existing literature that focuses on the provincial level to study the rural revitalization effect of digital inclusive finance, this paper sinks the data to the county level and conducts heterogeneity tests based on counties with different levels of digital infrastructure and rural residents’ education, expanding the research horizon of existing literature. Second, it explores the theoretical mechanisms of how digital inclusive finance affects rural revitalization from three new perspectives: entity cultivation effect, industrial structure upgrading effect, and consumer market expansion effect, providing new perspectives and new evidence for a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between the two. Accordingly, this paper suggests creating a digital inclusive finance ecosystem at the county level, exploring diversified scenarios of digital inclusive finance, paying attention to the “hardware” construction and “software” cultivation of rural areas, and smoothing the mechanism through which digital inclusive finance promotes rural revitalization. This will better release the “dividends” of digital inclusive finance, promote comprehensive rural revitalization, and achieve common prosperity for all people. The research results provide detailed empirical evidence and policy references for digital inclusive finance to empower rural revitalization in China.