Abstract: In recent years, with the large-scale development and utilization of coal resources, China's coal resource-based cities are facing a series of serious problems, such as resource exhaustion, environmental pollution, slow economic development, which seriously hinder the sustainable development of cities.As an important part of coal resource-based cities, coal resource-exhausted cities are the most serious and most urgent cities in need of transformation.Based on this, this paper takes 16 coal resource-exhausted cities in China as the research object, uses super SBM-DEA model and Malmquist index model to evaluate the transformation efficiency of sustainable development, the main conclusions of this paper are as follows.In 2017, the transformation efficiency of most cities' sustainable development is good, but there are still some cities with insufficient efficiency, which is mainly caused by different degrees of redundancy or insufficiency of input-output elements allocation.The total factor productivity of 16 cities is on the rise, which shows that the transformation of sustainable development of each city has achieved good results.However, at present, the role of technological progress in promoting the sustainable development of each city is obviously stronger than the technical efficiency.The government should focus on improving the level of technical efficiency.According to the Malmquist index in the three periods, cities are divided into four types:steady rising, first increasing and then decreasing, existing unfavorable fluctuation and favorable fluctuation.Corresponding countermeasures and suggestions are given according to the characteristics of each type of city.