<p>Urban entrepreneurship among China’s rural migrant workers offers a crucial pathway toward increased household income and balanced urban-rural development. Using data from the 2017 wave of China Migrants Dynamic Survey, this paper introduces an index quantifying family-oriented migration and investigates its relationship with entrepreneurship. The results show that family-oriented migration significantly increases the likelihood of entrepreneurship among migrant workers. This result remains robust across a series of robustness checks, including propensity score matching, placebo tests, and models with stringent fixed effects. Mechanism analyses suggest that family-oriented migration fosters entrepreneurship primarily by enhancing income motivation and social integration. However, peer effects negatively moderate the positive impact of family migration on entrepreneurship, while also weakening the positive influence of social integration and income motivation on entrepreneurial outcomes. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that this promotive effect is more pronounced among women, low-skilled migrants, and those engaged in low-tech industries, necessity-driven entrepreneurship. Regionally, the effect is strongest in central China relative to eastern and western counterparts. In terms of household structure, the effect is most pronounced in “Couple Only” households, followed by “Nuclear Family” households, and weakest in “Joint Family” households. These findings underscore the multifaceted role of families in promoting entrepreneurial decisions via risk control, resource pooling, and identity reconstruction, highlighting the need for supportive urban policies toward family migration and migrant entrepreneurship.</p>