Despite that diverse carbon materials have been designed as framework to anchor molybdenum carbide to efficiently improve catalytic performance for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), simply and uniformly hybridizing Mo and carbon source to form well-defined heteroatom-doped Mo2C/carbon nanostructure using suitable precursors to expose the more active sites and optimize electron structure Mo2C is still great challenge. Herein, we design and fabricate N, P-co-doped molybdenum carbide/porous carbon hybrid rough microspheres by a simple hydrothermal and followed annealing method using red jujube and phosphomolybdic acid as carbon and Mo source, respectively. Benefiting from carbon framework derived from red jujube inhibiting the aggregation of Mo2C nano particles, N, P co-doping changing the electro-structure of the adjacent Mo and C atoms, and rough micro-spherical structure increasing the electrolyte-active materials contact surface, the resulting material exhibits high electrocatalytic performance with a low overpotential of 103 and 80 mV at current densities of 10 mA cm(-2), a small Tafel slope of 57 and 46 mV dec(-1), respectively, in acidic and alkaline electrolyte, and excellent stability. The convenient resource, facile preparation and high performance make this material showing great potential in cost effective hydrogen production. (C) 2019 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.