Improving the separation of photogenerated carriers and suppressing the rapid complication of electron–hole pairs are essential ways to improve photocatalytic hydrogen production activity. The high recombination rate of the photogenerated carriers is an issue encountered when developing CdS as a promising photocatalytic material. This work allowed to accelerate the separation of photogenerated electrons and holes by loading monoclinic β-AgVO 3 on hexagonal CdS nanorods to construct a one-dimensional (1D)/1D p-n heterojunction. The introduction of monoclinic β-AgVO 3 with a narrow band gap effectively improves the light absorption of CdS, which is conducive to improving the use of visible light. The integrated electric field of the p–n heterojunction can effectively transfer electrons and holes in the direction suitable to hydrogen evolution. The photoluminescence and electrochemical characterization of the catalysts showed that the p–n heterojunction formed after loading β-AgVO 3 greatly improved the separation efficiency of photocarriers. The hydrogen evolution experiments show that the composite catalyst has good photocatalytic hydrogen evolution capability and stability. The composite catalyst with the best photocatalytic performance was obtained by studying β-AgVO 3 with different loadings. The composite catalyst reached 581.5 μmol of hydrogen amount within 5 h, which is 3.8 times higher than that of CdS alone and its apparent quantum efficiency reaches 8.02%. The present work provides a possible solution for the development of perovskite and the extensiveness of CdS in photocatalytic hydrogen evolution. Graphical abstract