Hamid Najaf Zadeh - Geography and Urban Planning Department, Mrand Branch, Islamic Azad University, Marand, Iran.
Karim Hosseinzadeh Dalir - Geography and Urban Planning Department, Mrand Branch, Islamic Azad University, Marand, Iran.
Mohammad Reza Pourmohammadi - Geography and urban Planning Department, Faculty of Planning and Environment Sciences, University of Tabriz, Iran

Supply and maintenance of urban drinking water utilities are the most important priorities of people in the world especially in urban areas and it is very clear for urban planners or decision makers to evaluate the costs of action or weigh them against the problems of inaction. Also, specific annual budget is essential for ensuring people welfare and using water utilities with good quality. There are different issues in relation to managing of urban water utilities in terms of cultural, social, physical, environmental and even political and it is necessary to assess the existing conditions of utility by authorities and experts for making decision about those applications. So, we introduce Performance Benchmarking method for reaching this aim. This method is one of the best and update solutions in analyzing drinking water utility in developed countries especially in United State of America. So, in this paper, seven drinking water utilities of United State have been compared with Tabriz metropolitan drinking water utility that is located in North West of Iran and results of indicators’ performance have been comparatively explained. Also, Results show that Tabriz metropolitan drinking water utilities are low advanced in terms of many indicators’ performance than seven United States drinking water utilities. But, in some indexes almost equal to and in certain other cases are advanced than it. However, this methodology is very effective for decision makers, responsible and other experts in all regions and this model can be applied for other cities and urban areas.

Assessment, Existing conditions, Performance benchmarking, Tabriz Metropolitan, Water utility