Abstract: The fixed shale gas production subsidy policy does not take into account the specificity of resource endowment, which makes the limited subsidy funds flow to the high-quality resources in priority, leading to the unbalanced development of shale gas development in China. Based on this, a differential subsidy approach with resource endowment and exploitation conditions as the key factors is proposed, which consists of two parts: the basic subsidy and the variable subsidy, in order to effectively guide and incentivize the investment behavior of shale gas development enterprises. First, the basic subsidy required by enterprises is obtained by using the net present value method on the premise of guaranteeing their basic rate of return needs. Then, based on the principal-agent theory, it constructs the return functions of both the government and the enterprises, and by quantifying the correlation coefficients between resource endowment and exploitation conditions and social benefits, it obtains the measurement model of variable subsidy and the range of variable subsidy coefficients for three types of blocks （golden-type, sunrise-type, sunset-type）. The results show that golden-type blocks can achieve production returns without any subsidies; sunrise-type blocks can be invested normally with only basic subsidies sunrise-type blocks are the objects that the government should focus on supporting; and sunset-type blocks are the upper limit of variable subsidies. The fluctuation range of the results caused by changes in uncertainties such as the output coefficients of social benefits, resource endowment and mining conditions in the variable subsidy coefficient model ranges from −6.88% to 6.99%, which proves that the model has a good robustness. The differential subsidy approach takes into account the fairness of the policy implementation of different shale gas blocks, and is expected to improve the efficiency of the use of financial funds, as well as effectively incentivize the balanced and healthy development of different shale gas blocks.