Pitch-based hard carbon (HC) materials at low cost and high carbon yield represent a promising anode for sodium-ion batteries. However, their limited capacity poses a significant challenge to their practical use. Here, we report a universal strategy to boost sodium storage of pitch-based HC materials via catalytic oxidation with magnesium oxide to produce a high-oxygen pitch. The oxygenic groups suppress pitch softening and molecular rearrangement during carbonization, resulting in a highly disordered structure and substantially closed pores in the obtained HC materials. As a result, the optimized HC materials achieve a specific capacity of 321.7 mAh g