[Objective] Current acceptance checks for soil and water conservation (SWC) in urban construction projects are largely compliance-oriented, which makes it difficult to differentiate project performance and identify improvement priorities. This study develops a quantitative, performance-based evaluation scheme that can rank and classify SWC effectiveness among projects that have already passed acceptance.[Methods] Guided by the local technical specification for urban construction-project SWC and informed by the sponge city concept, we established a multi-criteria framework with four criterion layers—governance implementation, soil retention, vegetation measures, and runoff regulation—comprising 11 indicators. Objective weights were derived using the entropy weight method (EWM), and a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (FCE) model was employed to address the inherent ambiguity between performance grades. The coupled EWM–FCE approach was applied to 34 completed projects in Xi’an, China, covering municipal infrastructure, real-estate development, and public-service facilities, to evaluate performance and interpret inter-type differences.[Results] The model showed strong discriminatory power across project types, yielding a clear performance hierarchy: real-estate developments achieved the highest mean score (72.54), municipal projects were intermediate, and public-service facilities were lowest (58.38). Weight analysis highlighted runoff-regulation indicators as dominant drivers; the composite site runoff coefficient (C9) played a pivotal role and, together with the runoff control rate (C10) and permeable pavement ratio (C11), largely determined overall performance. Mechanistic comparison further indicated that real-estate projects tended to perform better in erosion control and construction-phase protection (C2–C5, especially spoil/stockpile protection, C3), municipal projects exhibited greater potential for upgrading the runoff-regulation chain (C9–C11), and public-service facilities commonly underperformed in sponge-city integration indicators (C7, C10, C11).[Conclusion] The proposed EWM–FCE framework provides a practical, performance-oriented tool that outputs composite scores, grades, and key bottleneck indicators, enabling ranking and stratified assessment beyond pass/fail acceptance. It can support self-diagnosis during reporting and targeted regulatory review, and it helps formulate type-specific upgrading pathways, facilitating a transition from compliance-based SWC management to performance-based governance in urban construction projects.