Introduction: Travel burden is a key dimension in conceptualizing geographic access to health care. Travel time measured from the perspective of actual utilization provides practical evidence on healthcare-related travel burden, while studies in this aspect remain limited, especially under the context of China's healthcare system. This study aimed to bridge the research gap by describing the current situation of travel burden as well as its related influencing factors in China. Methods: Hospital discharge data which involved over 300 million inpatients from Sichuan province, China, was used. Travel burden was measured by the modeled utilization travel time spent on road trips from patients' residential locations to hospitals they were admitted. Quantile regression and mutilevel linear model were adopted to examine different effects posed by various determinants on travel time across the travel burden spectrum. Results: The average modeled utilization travel time was 23.14 min in Sichuan China, while 236,988 patients had to spend over 1 h driving to obtain medical services. The regressions indicated that inpatient's travel time spent across the travel burden spectrums was positively affected by multiple factors including urban employment basic medical insurance insured, being admitted through the emergency department, being in general condition when getting admitted, having more complications, travel time to the nearest hospital. Moreover, travel time spent by inpatients among groups with heavy travel burdens could be dramatically decreased by enhanced availability of high-quality health care or improved transport infrastructure. Conclusion: Healthcare-related travel burden was found to be generally acceptable in Sichuan province, China, while travel burden demonstrated large disparities among different regions. These regression findings provided evidence-based implications to inform future policy-making procedures in terms of alleviating healthcare-related travel burden via the optimization of health resources or improving road constructions, especially for residents under heavy travel burdens.