ABSTRACT In this letter, we proposed a matting model guided variational pansharpening method with fractional order gradient transferring constraint to fuse a low-resolution (LR) multispectral (MS) and a high-resolution (HR) panchromatic (Pan) image to an HR-MS image. Specifically for the proposed model, we not only used the commonly local spectral fidelity constraint for spectral information preserving, but also applied the famous matting model fusion method to further enforce a spatial-spectral fidelity constraint, and particularly proposed a fractional-order gradient transferring constraint to transfer the spatial information of Pan image to the desired HR-MS image. Then, we designed an optimization algorithm to solve the proposed model efficiently. Finally, the experimental results showed the superiority of the proposed method to various methods subjectively and objectively.