<p>Traditional urban water management often relies on aggregate per capita indicators that fail to capture the complex dynamics and systemic inefficiencies of growing cities. This study applies Urban Scaling Theory to analyze consumptive water use across 343 Chilean communes, evaluating how demographic, environmental, and socioeconomic variables modulate metabolic performance in a context of chronic water security challenges. Our findings reveal a critical superlinear scaling of domestic consumption (β ≈1.08), where water demand grows faster than population size, indicating that current urbanization patterns generate diseconomies of scale rather than expected infrastructure efficiencies. Conversely, industrial water use is found to be entirely decoupled from population size, driven instead by resource proximity in low-density territories. This reveals a functional and spatial mismatch where wealthy residential hubs consume water disproportionately while the environmental costs of industrial production are offshored to less affluent areas, commonly known as “sacrifice areas”. We conclude 1 that sustainable urban planning must move beyond simple per capita targets to address the sector-specific scaling properties and underlying socioeconomic inequities that govern urban water metabolism. Effective governance requires multi-scale strategies that integrate administrative management with biophysical constraints to ensure long-term water security and social equity.</p>