Against the backdrop of rising global unilateralism and protectionism, institutional openness in the service sector has emerged as a critical pillar for China in constructing a high-standard open economy.This study, adopting the perspective of the comprehensive pilot program to expand the opening-up of the service sector, systematically reviews the current state of China’s institutional openness and analyzes the alignment between the measures implemented in pilot regions and international high-standard economic and trade agreements such as the CPTPP and DEPA. The findings reveal that pilot regions have actively promoted deep integration with CPTPP and DEPA rules, focusing on key areas including market access and operation of productive service industry, green finance and data protection standards, and the cross-border flow of talent, capital, and data. These efforts encompass critical aspects such as intellectual property protection, environmental standards, e-commerce, financial service, data innovation, personal information protection, cross-border data flow, and government data openness. Based on it, this paper proposes several pathways aligning China’s service sector opening-up with high-standard international economic and trade rules. These include integrating the negative list for cross-border service trade with the negative list for foreign investment access facilitating the cross-border flow of service-related factors and promoting the alignment and mutual recognition of service rules regulations governance and standards.