The cycle life of lead-carbon battery is greatly restricted by the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) of lead-carbon electrode. Lead carbon composite, rather than the pure carbon additive, inhibits the HER effectively, and may also strengthen the connection between lead and carbon components of lead-carbon electrode, which contributes to the performance enhancement of lead-carbon battery. In this paper, a novel lead carbon (C/Pb) composite is prepared by electroless plating lead on the rice-husk-based hierarchical porous carbon. The as-prepared C/Pb composite significantly suppresses the HER, and enlarges the electrochemically active surface area of the lead-carbon electrode. As expected, the cycle life of lead carbon battery with the optimized C/Pb composite in negative electrode is >11 times of the blank one under high-rate partial state-of-charge (HRPSoC) operation. This performance improvement is attributed to the enhanced interface between lead and carbon, and the inhibition effect on HER of C/Pb composite.