Abstract: Accounting for residents’ domestic water use, clarifying the dynamics of the evolution of spatial-temporal patterns, and quantifying the driving effects of spatial-temporal differences are important to improve the efficiency of residents’ domestic water use in the Yangtze River Economic Belt. By calculating urban and rural residents’ domestic water consumption, a center of gravity model is established, and LMDI is used to decompose residents’ domestic water into consumption intensity effect, per capita consumption effect, urbanization effect, and population scale effect from time and space. The results show that: (1) The urban and rural residents’ domestic water consumption is increasing and decreasing respectively, the former has less upstream than the middle and lower reaches, and the latter has more balanced upstream, middle and lower reaches. (2) The center of gravity of domestic water use of urban and rural residents moves to the northwest, from Xianning and Yueyang to Jingzhou respectively. The imbalance between the two shows an increasing and decreasing trend respectively, and the former is greater than the latter. In this process, the upstream and downstream provinces and cities play a significant role. (3) The intensity of urban and rural consumption water consumption and per capita consumption level are the main factors that promote and inhibit the reduction of residents ’domestic water consumption. Urbanization and population growth will lead to an increase in residents’ domestic water consumption. The effect of changes in the proportion of urban and rural population is heterogeneous. (4) In terms of narrowing the difference with the average level, regardless of the overall perspective or the urban-rural perspective, consumption water intensity and per capita consumption level have opposite effects, and urbanization has spatial heterogeneity. Based on this, it puts forward suggestions on paying attention to the impact of residents’ consumption on residents’ domestic water consumption and improving water consumption quotas, and points out that it is necessary to further reduce accounting errors and further explore the impact of household, behavior, gender and other factors on residents’ domestic water consumption.