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The development of scalable hydrogen production technology to produce hydrogen economically and in an environmentally friendly way is particularly important. The hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) is a clean, renewable, and potentially cost-effective pathway to produce hydrogen, but it requires the use of a favorable electrocatalyst which can generate hydrogen with minimal overpotential for practical applications. Up to now, ruthenium phosphide Ru2P has been considered as a high-performance electrocatalyst for the HER. However, a tedious post-treatment method as well as large consumption of solvents in conventional solution-based synthesis still limits the scalable production of Ru2P electrocatalysts in practical applications. In this study, we report a facile and cost-effective strategy to controllably synthesize uniform ultrasmall Ru2P nanoparticles embedded in carbon for highly efficient HER. The key to our success lies in the use of a solid-state ball milling-assisted technique, which overcomes the drawbacks of the complicated post-treatment procedure and large solvent consumption compared with solution-based synthesis. The obtained electrocatalyst exhibits excellent Pt-like HER performance with a small overpotential of 36 mV at current density of 10 mA cm−2 in 1 M KOH, providing new opportunities for the fabrication of highly efficient HER electrocatalysts in real-world applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]