Objective   To examine the status and the related factors of drinking water behavior among households in rural areas of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region (Guangxi) and to explore effective drinking water treatment methods other than water-boiling in rural households.

  Methods   We conducted a face-to-face questionnaire survey among 450 households selected with multi-stage stratified random sampling in two counties of Guangxi between 2013 and 2014. We collected information on 10 aspects related to drinking water treatment. We adopted multivariate logistic regression to analyze influencing factors of drinking water behavior among the households.

  Results   Of all the households surveyed, 47.5 %, 35.0 %, and 17.5 % reported taking boiled, bottled, and unboiled water as drinking water, respectively. There was a significant difference in the proportion of households taking boiled water as drinking water (χ² = 9.547, P = 0.002). Multivariate logistic regression analyses showed that the households with higher level of relevant knowledge (odds ratio OR = 0.290, 95 % confidence interval95 % CI:0.097 – 0.865), not discharging sewage at will (OR = 0.295, 95 % CI:0.112 – 0.776), without household water storage (OR = 0.059, 95% CI:0.013 – 0.269), and not preferring to drink boiled water (OR = 0.001, 95 % CI:0.000 – 0.005) were more unlikely to take boiled water as drinking water.

  Conclusion   In rural areas of Guangxi, the proportion of households using electric kettle to boil water for drinking is not high and a number of households use fuel-based method to boil drinking water or drink bottled water; some households even drink unboiled water; the over standard rate of microbial indicators is relatively high for samples of the drinking water for the households.