As the water scarcity increasing, tradable water rights mechanism has been a new direction for water management in the world, and water markets have been founded in some countries abroad. The initial water rights allocation was critical for water market to function actively according to Corse, which has also proved in recent research on water markets. That ecological and environmental water demand should be prior to be satisfied or guaranteed has been realized and accepted widely, especially for the inland river basin in arid regions. At the same time, equity and efficiency are another two basic goals and principles for initial water rights allocation. As initial water rights allocation is a reallocation of utilization situation in existence, various attitudes should be considered as much as possible. We carried out some questionnaire surveys to users in the basin. Based on the users5 survey results, 12 experts from 5 study fields made further judgments to combine the attitudes of both the users and the experts;we obtain the indexes values by AHP analysis. The pilot study of Zhangye prefecture in Heihe river basin showed that the actual utilization in most counties have exceeded their initial allocation except the Sunan county and Shandan county, which has provided some convictive evidences for tradable water rights among different counties and the potential ecological compensation for the upstream in the valley.