The fundamental equation of the thermodynamic system gives the relation between the internal energy, entropy and volume of two adjacent equilibrium states. Taking a higher-dimensional charged Gauss–Bonnet black hole in de Sitter space as a thermodynamic system, the state parameters have to meet the fundamental equation of thermodynamics. We introduce the effective thermodynamic quantities to describe the black hole in de Sitter space. Considering that in the lukewarm case the temperature of the black hole horizon is equal to that of the cosmological horizon, we conjecture that the effective temperature has the same value. In this way, we can obtain the entropy formula of spacetime by solving the differential equation. We find that the total entropy contains an extra term besides the sum of the entropies of the two horizons. The corrected term of the entropy is a function of the ratio of the black hole horizon radius to the cosmological horizon radius, and is independent of the charge of the spacetime.