Objective To understand the cognitive status of public health emergency risk communication among grass-root health emergency staffs, so as to provide help to improve their understanding and ability for risk communication. Methods Questionnaire was designed and used to survey the emergency staffs from 19 counties in Chongqing. Descriptive analysis and Chi-square test were used for analysis. Results A total of 429 grass-root health emergency staffs were surveyed. It was found that 4.7% (20/429) of them characterized their familiarity of risk communication concept as "Heard of, very familiar with it", and the perception differences were statistically significant among participants of different ages, technical titles, training and work experience in public health emergency risk communication (P<0.05). Only 0.5% (2/429) of the participants were aware of all the core information risk communication; 24.9%(107/429) of the participants said they were willing to assume the risk communication task very much. The participants thought that the main reasons affecting public health emergency risk communication included: collection of the monitoring risk information was not complete (78.8%, 338/429), there was no established working mechanism (68.8%, 295/429), communication between departments was difficult (62.7%, 269/429), and there was a lack of technical proposal for risk communication (60.8%, 261/429). Conclusion The cognitive level of public health emergency risk communication among grass-root health emergency staffs is at a relatively low level. The emergency staffs have a poor knowledge about risk communication and less willingness to the work, and they are not competent for health emergency work. More efforts should be made to train the emergency staffs to meet the requirement of public health emergency work.