Under the dual background of the Chinese government’s active implementation of the national development strategy to cope with childlessness and the improvement of education burden reduction policies, exploring the intrinsic correlation between shadow education and residents’ fertility intentions is of great practical significance. Based on the theory of family fertility decision-making, this paper constructs an analytical framework and empirically examines the impact and mechanism of shadow education expansion on residents’ fertility intentions using data from the Chinese Family Panel Studies and city-level data. It is found that under the effect of status externality, the expansion of shadow education has a significant negative impact on residents’ fertility intentions, which is more prominent in families with children, families with close social interactions, and relatively disadvantaged groups such as low-income groups and those not participating in pension insurance. Mechanism analysis shows that shadow education increases family education expenditure, reduces individual leisure time, and triggers educational anxiety, forcing individuals to face fertility costs such as “expensive child rearing”, “tiring child rearing” and “difficult child rearing”, thereby weakening fertility intentions. Further analysis shows that increasing public education expenditure and implementing social security policies for the elderly can effectively alleviate the above negative impacts.