Based on the panel data of water footprint in 11 provinces and cities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt from 2009 to 2018, the Tapio decoupling elastic coefficient model is used to study the decoupling effects between the water footprint and the high-quality economic development, and the STIRPAT model is further used to study the driving factors of water footprint intensity. The conclusions show that the total amount of water footprint in the Yangtze River Economic Belt decreases year by year after the inflection point in 2016, while the overall level of high-quality economic development steadily increases, and they exhibit a weak decoupling trend. Among them, the provinces and cities in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River have basically realized strong decoupling, and those in the middle and upper reaches change from weak correlation to strong one.