The purposes of the work are to fabricate novel environment-friendly water-based polyamide-imide (PAI)-graphite-LaF3 bonded solid-lubricating coatings (BSLCs), and investigate the corresponding tribological properties and mechanisms. The experimental results reveal that the preparation of the water-based PAI-graphite-LaF3 BSLCs has significantly reduced the usage of organic solvent. When the mass percent of nano-LaF3 is 5 wt%, the water-based PAI-graphite-LaF3 BSLCs exhibit superior mechanical and tribological properties, which are comparable to those of the reported organic-solvent-based BSLCs. The tribological mechanisms were systematically investigated concerning the failure mechanism, the tribological reactions and structural fluctuations of graphite.