Marital status is closely related to living arrangements and life quality of the older people, but its determinants have received limited attention. This paper analyzes the effect of education on the marital status of Chinese elderly based on the three-wave CLASS data collected in 2014, 2016 and 2018. The results indicate that education has a significant positive impact: older adults with higher educational attainment are more likely to be currently married.  The total effect of education can be decomposed into explicit and implicit effects. By using mediating effect test method, the KHB method and by calculating the mediating zstatistic, this study finds that education affects marital status partly through income and pension. In addition, the analysis shows that the effect of education on the marital status of the elderly is moderated by gender, residence and age.