Under the Hefei Metropolitan Area strategy, Lu’an is shifting from a western Anhui peripheral city to a coordinated node linking Hefei’s manufacturing, innovation and market functions with the Dabie Mountain ecological zone. Based on official statistical bulletins, annual plan reports and policy documents for 2024–2025, this study constructs a six-dimensional evaluation framework covering industrial coordination, investment support, innovation transformation, ecological co-governance, public services and opening-up cooperation, and then conducts a coupling diagnosis around three functional blocks: production and market, innovation and ecology, and services and openness. The results show that Lu’an’s GDP reached 240.73 billion yuan in 2025 with a growth rate of 5.4%. Industrial investment maintained rapid growth at 19.8%, and the number of new-energy-vehicle supporting enterprises expanded to 304, with expected annual revenue of 45 billion yuan. At the same time, fixed-asset investment turned negative, declining by 5.3%, and R&D intensity remained at 1.54%, indicating that the city’s investment structure and innovation conversion capacity still constrain higher-level coordinated development. The comprehensive coordination diagnostic value increased from 0.781 in 2024 to 0.802 in 2025, mainly driven by improvements in public service, tourism consumption and opening-up cooperation. On this basis, the study identifies six pathways for Lu’an: deeper industrial-chain embedding, stabilization of industrial investment, stronger innovation transfer, ecological value realization, public-service integration and broader Yangtze River Delta cooperation. These findings provide an evidence-based basis for improving Lu’an’s participation quality within the Hefei Metropolitan Area.
