Fiscal authorities are entrusted with significant responsibilities in advancing ecological conservation and environmental governance objectives. Under the digital economy context, exploration of the relationship between new infrastructure-induced fiscal pressure and the performance of local governments' environmental protection expenditures is considered crucial for achieving pollution and carbon reduction targets. Based on spatial spillover perspective, panel data from 267 prefecture-level cities in China from 2013 to 2021 were employed to construct a spatial Durbin model. The relative fiscal pressure caused by new infrastructure is empirically verified to influence environmental protection expenditure performance, while spatial spillover characteristics of such performance are simultaneously examined. Significant enhancement of local governments' environmental protection expenditure performance is found to be triggered by new infrastructure-induced relative fiscal pressure, with results remaining robust after rigorous testing and endogeneity analysis. Positive spatial spillover effects are observed in China's local government environmental protection expenditure performance, exhibiting regional heterogeneity. Policy implications are provided regarding both performance improvement of environmental protection expenditures and fiscal pressure alleviation for local governments.