As an effective way to ensure the economic benefits of enterprises, process operating performance assessment has attracted more and more attention from industry and academia in recent years. In this paper, a stacked performance‐relevant enhanced denoising autoencoder (SPEDAE) network is designed for the operating performance assessment of industrial processes. Compared to the original denoising auto‐encoder (DAE), each performance‐relevant enhanced denoising auto‐encoder (PEDAE) not only reconstructs the input features in the output layer, but also strives to reconstruct the original input data and the performance grade labels simultaneously. Then the SPEDAE is formed by stacking multiple PEDAEs layer by layer. Through this improved training strategy, SPEDAE can avoid accumulated information loss during the deep feature extraction process, improve the robustness of the network, and extract features closely related to the operating performance, thereby better completing the assessment task. The effectiveness of the proposed assessment method is validated on the case of gold cyanide leaching process. Compared with several methods, the proposed SPEDAE has the highest accuracy and reaches 99.85%, which demonstrates its superiority in operating performance assessment.