To comprehensively and scientifically understand the quality status of the leading rice varieties in China, this study collected 72 rice samples that were predominantly cultivated in 14 provinces in 2023. It analyzed and compared the differences in processing quality, appearance quality, cooking and eating quality, pasting characteristics, and nutritional quality among Northeastern japonica, Southern japonica, Yangtze River Basin indica, Southeastern Coastal indica, and Southeastern Coastal early indica rice. Northeastern japonica rice were dominated by short-grain and medium-grain varieties, Southern japonica rice were dominated by short-grain varieties, Yangtze River Basin indica rice and Southeast Coastal indica rice were dominated by long-grain varieties, and Southeast Coastal early indica rice were all medium-grain varieties. The processing quality of japonica rice was significantly better than that of indica rice, and better than that of early indica rice. Northeastern japonica rice, Southeast Coastal indica rice and Yangtze River Basin indica rice had good appearance quality, while Southeast Coastal Early indica rice and Southern japonica rice had high chalkiness, poor transparency, and relatively poor appearance quality. Except for Southeast Coastal early indica rice, other types of leading varieties had good cooking and eating quality, with a high quality rate of more than 90.0%. Southeast Coastal early indica rice had high amylose content, met the requirements of special rice for rice noodles, and had good processing use. Compared with indica rice, japonica rice had lower cool gel viscosity, breakdown viscosity, and consistency viscosity, indicating that the cooked rice would be softer, more elastic and chewy, and the texture of cold rice was softer. Compared with the Northeastern japonica rice, the Southern japonica rice had lower cool gel viscosity, setback value viscosity and consistency viscosity, and higher breakdown viscosity, indicating that the cooked rice would be softer and more viscous, but less elastic than that of Northeastern japonica rice, and the texture of cold rice would be softer; the Southeastern Coastal early indica rice possessed the highest peak viscosity, hot viscosity, cool viscosity, setback viscosity and consistency viscosity, and lowest breakdown viscosity, indicating that it had a firm and coarse texture of cooked rice and hard texture of cold rice, but contained starch resistant to degradation, making it highly suitable for processing into products such as rice noodles; no significant difference was observed in the pasting characteristics between Yangtze River Basin indica rice and the Southeast Coastal indica rice. Overall, all the leading rice varieties showed excellent cooking edible quality or processing quality.