To safeguard national food security and achieve regional coordinated development, the central government has consistently increased vertical benefit compensation to major grain-producing regions and explored the establishment of a horizontal inter-provincial benefit compensation mechanism between grain producing and consuming regions. Based on the net grain transfer and the output elasticity of factors calculated by TFE-SFA for each province from 2004 to 2022, this paper uses the opportunity cost method to estimate the inter-provincial horizontal benefit compensation between grain producing and consuming regions in 30 provinces (municipalities and autonomous regions) across the country during 2004-2022. The main conclusions are as follows: First, the responsibility for grain production is extremely unevenly distributed between regions, with only a few provinces such as Heilongjiang, Inner Mongolia, Jilin, Henan, and Xinjiang consistently able to net-export grain. Second, based on registered population data, the total compensation for 2022 and the five-year average are 166.438 billion yuan and 165.495 billion yuan, respectively. Based on the resident population, the total compensation for 2022 and the five-year average are 181.157 billion yuan and 181.969 billion yuan, respectively, with Heilongjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Jilin accounting for about 90% of the compensation. To better safeguard national food security and coordinate regional development, it is necessary to establish a cooperative development mechanism between grain producing and consuming regions, improve the inter-provincial horizontal benefit compensation system, and enhance the grain circulation statistics system by creating a cross-regional data-sharing platform for grain circulation.