Urban water consumption has increased along with growing urbanization and the rapid development of industry and agriculture. Water resources shortage has been a strict constraint for sustainable urban development. Accounting for the water embodied in trade or final demand can provide a new perspective for urban water consumption. In this paper, we proposed an urban virtual water accounting framework to calculate the water use coefficient, virtual water consumption and virtual water trade volume based on input-output (IO) analysis. We used the IO table of Beijing in 2012 and sectoral water consumption to study the sectoral virtual water consumption and virtual water flows among sectors. The results show that Beijing is a net importer of virtual water, importing 6.77×10⁹ m³, equal to 82% of the total virtual water in 2012 (8.25×10⁹ m³). Agriculture (Ag) and manufacturing (Ma) are the main import sectors. The export structure of Beijing needs to be adjusted due to its huge virtual water exports, which accounted for 79.9% of the final demand, whilst 85.04% virtual water consumption was used for final demand, and, agricultural products create only 1% economic benefits with 6.7% virtual water consumption. These results indicate that Beijing benefits little from the large amount of virtual water exports, and the exports of virtual water-intensified products should be reduced. The main outflow-inflow pairs, including Ag-Ma, Ag-Se and Ma-Co, could be critical pathways for the reduction of indirect urban water consumption.