Abstract: To address the challenges in discriminating soil types and fertility grades in agricultural and forestry production, a new soil classification system was developed based on the fertility characteristics of the effective soil layer, leveraging established methodologies from both domestic and international systems. This method was used to evaluate the fertility of typical zonal upland soils in China, and the result was as follows: black soil > dark brown soil > brown soil > purple soil > yellow brown soil > cinnamon soil > yellow soil > sierozem > red soil. This result demonstrated that the new fertility evaluation method could effectively reveal the zonal differences in soil fertility. Compared with the classification and naming system of the “Third National Soil Survey” (TNSS) classification and the empirical analysis of the fertility evaluation, this classification and naming system could establish a one-to-one correspondence with the soil species names in the TNSS based on the morphological characteristics of soil profiles, and the order of soil fertility grades (from high to low) was roughly the same. This new classification method has the advantages of easy collection of indicators and simple operation, which achieves the unification of soil names and soil fertility and has strong guiding significance for agricultural and forestry production.