<p>The effect of <em>Eucalyptus</em> plantations on water balance is thought to be more severe than for commercial alternatives such as <em>Pinus</em> species. Although this perception is firmly entrenched, even in the scientific community, only four direct comparisons of the effect on the water balance of a <em>Eucalyptus</em> species and a commercial alternative have been published. One of these, from South Africa, showed that <em>Eucalyptus</em> <em>grandis</em> caused a larger and more rapid reduction in streamflow than <em>Pinus</em> <em>patula</em>. The other three, one in South Australia and two in Chile, did not find any significant difference between the annual evapotranspiration of <em>E. globulus</em> and <em>P. radiata</em> after canopy closure.</p> <p>While direct comparisons are few, there are at least 57 published estimates of annual evapotranspiration of either a <em>Eucalyptus</em> or <em>Pinus</em> species. This paper presents a meta-analysis of these published data. Zhang et al. (2004) fitted a relationship between the crop factor and the climate wetness index to published data from catchment studies and proposed this approach for comparing land uses. We fitted the same model to the published data for <em>Eucalyptus</em> and <em>Pinus</em> and found that the single parameter of this model did not differ significantly between the two genera (p=0.48). This implies that for a given climate wetness index the two genera have similar annual water use. The residuals compared to this model were significantly correlated with soil depth for <em>Eucalyptus</em>, but this was not the case for <em>Pinus</em>. For <em>Eucalyptus</em> the model overestimates the crop factor on deep soils and underestimates the crop factor on shallow soils.</p>