Enhancing the efficiency of public services is essential to residents in mountainous areas. It is also important to promote sustainable development of these regions. Analysing residents’ satisfaction with public services in mountainous areas can help in evaluating outcomes of fiscal investment and identifying potential coping approaches for improving public service efficiencies. The residents’ satisfaction with public services and the factors that influence such satisfaction were examined in this study. A study of 12 towns located in the southwestern Sichuan Province was performed using an entropy-weighted analytic hierarchy process (EWAHP), the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) and Tobit regression methods. The results indicate that: 1) the spatial distribution of satisfaction with public services is non-uniform, and the spatial distribution structure varies for different types of public services. 2) Residents’ satisfaction with public services is influenced by both objective and subjective factors. Population density, economic distance, social and cultural divisions and elevation are the major objective factors, whereas bounded rationality, the hierarchy of needs and service expectations are the main subjective factors. The most effective strategies for enhancing residents’ satisfaction with public services are likely to be clustering the population, choosing supply centres with different public services, regulating the cultural division in ethnic minority towns, selecting supply priorities in accordance with residents’ needs, implementing targeted intervention policies and establishing ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ integrated decision-making mechanisms. © 2017, Science Press, Northeast Institute of Geography and Agricultural Ecology, CAS and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.