Sustainable development and construction are the goal and vision of rural revitalization, the focus of promoting the integration of urban-rural development and building a sustainable urban-rural integration system. Under the background of the increasing urbanization process, it is necessary to define the stage and state of rural development, measure the development potential, and effectively identify the future development direction and mode of rural areas, and achieve the goal of rural sustainable development and construction. This paper chooses the Northern Jiangsu province as the research object, and 7980 administrative villages located in Huaihai Economic Zone as the evaluation units to study the rural development status of the village area units. Through the county scale constraints on the urban and rural development stage, the comprehensive measurement of the rural development potential is carried out with the idea of "differentiation and consistency". The results show that: (1) The rural areas in the study area can be divided into three development stages: urban leading, urban-rural linkage and rural leading, with the proportion of 15.38%, 46.15% and 38.46%, respectively. (2) The maximum and average values of the rural development status index in the study area are 6.209 and 1.714, characterized by high value area and low value area agglomeration, respectively. (3) The maximum and average values of rural development potential in the study area are 2.827 and 0.923, respectively, and the proportions of evaluation units are 4.45%, 15.20%, 23.22%, 35.39% and 21.74% with the potential grades from low to high. (4) According to the rural development potential, this study area can be divided into four categories: "key potential area", "balanced potential area", "moderate potential area" and "important maintenance area". This paper puts forward the development ideas of "Narrow the gap within the region by stimulating recessive vitality", "Achieve regional balanced development driven by advantage elements", "Find out disadvantage conditions and fill the potential space moderately" and "Maintain the present mode to achieve stable development".