The trade-off theory implies that firms have target levels of tax burden and will adjust when the current levels of tax burden deviate from the target. The research on the determinants behind the dynamic adjustment of tax burden has just started and still like a “black box”, which requires scholars to carry out in-depth research. Since tax compliance involves the game between the firms and the tax authorities, the tax enforcement will undoubtedly affect the adjustment of firms towards the target levels of tax burden. In view of this, we use the data of A-share listed firms from 2003 to 2019 to construct research samples and examine the impact of tax enforcement on the speed at which firms adjust towards their target levels of tax burden. The test results show that the higher the level of tax enforcement, the slower the adjustment speed toward the target levels of tax burden, indicating that tax enforcement has an inhibitory effect on the adjustment of firms’ level of tax burden. Under various robustness tests, the conclusions remain unchanged. The further analyses show that the mechanism by which tax enforcement restrains the adjustment speed of tax burden includes two aspects of reducing the motivation of tax burden adjustment and increasing the cost of implementing tax adjustment activities. The impact of tax enforcement on the dynamic adjustment of tax burden is asymmetric. Compared with the upward adjustment of the tax burden level (increasing to the target value), the impact of tax enforcement on the downward adjustment of the tax burden level (reducing to the target value) is more significant. The results of heterogeneity analysis show that the inhibitory effect of tax enforcement on the speed of adjustment to target level of tax burden is more obvious in the firms with higher agency costs, more media attention, and lower level of product market competition. This paper not only sheds light on the determinants of the speed at which firms adjust their tax burden, compensates for the insufficiency of the existing literature, but also investigates the influence of tax enforcement activities of the tax authorities on firms’ tax management behavior from a dynamic perspective, which is conducive to comprehensively revealing the logic and regularities of the impact of tax enforcement on the firms behavior.