Abstract <p>The Pearl River Delta (PRD) is one of the three largest coastal urban agglomerations in China. Water saving is crucial to its water supply security challenged by the rapidly developing economy. This study firstly judges the decoupling type for each city of the PRD to reveal its dynamic changing characteristics of economic growth and total water use from 2005 to 2019 using the Tapio decoupling model, then identifies the driving factors of water use dynamic change using the STIRPAT model, and finally differentiated water-saving paths are proposed. The results show that strong and weak decoupling types basically dominate the nine cities of the PRD over the past decade, urbanization rate is negatively correlated with the total water use of the cities with stable decoupling type and water use per 10 000 yuan of industrial added value has a significant impact on the per capital comprehensive water use of most cities. It can be concluded that the growth rate of GDP is greater than that of total water use in the PRD over the past decade; appropriately increasing urbanization rate has a great impact on reducing total water use in those cities with stable decoupling type, and improving industrial water use efficiency plays an important role in the water-saving path of the PRD.</p>