ABSTRACT:The aim of this paper is to present a multicriteria methodology for decision aid at the stage of programming a water supply system (WSS) for a rural area. The programming stage is an intermediate one between planning and designing water supply facilities, and can be decomposed into two problems: (a) setting up a priority order of water users, taking into account socio‐economic criteria; and (b) choosing the best technical variant of the WSS. Among the criteria considered for the latter problem, there is a criterion of distance between the socio‐economic priorities of users and the precedence orders of users according to the technical programming, which plays a coordinating role between problems (a) and (b). All steps of the presented methodology are illustrated by a real case st