Using four round Chinese household income project surveys of 2002-2018, this paper explores the wage gaps between migrants and local labor forces in urban China’s labor markets, and explains the change of wage gaps from the perspectives of intra- and inter-industrial differentials. We find that in 2002 and 2007, the wage of workers with local registration is higher than that with non-local registration, while the result is reversed in 2013 and 2018. There are mainly two reasons: Firstly, the human capital of migrants has been improved a lot, and it is closed to the human capital of the workers with local registration, so the explained component of the intra-industrial differentials converges to zero; Secondly, the geographic discrimination between and within industries is declined due to household registration reform. Although regional discrimination still exists among industries, the compensation effect within the industry exceeds the discrimination, resulting in the reversal of household registration wage difference within the industry.
