Iran, with an average rainfall of 260 mm is among the arid countries of the world. Factors such as population growth, the need for more food, industrial and agricultural development necessitate the increase ofe water demand day by day. Increased water use efficiency (WUE) in agriculture is a key approach to reduce water shortage and environmental problems, so measuring WUE is an important parameter in this regard. Water retention treatments such as: using super-absorbent plastic membrane and bentonite clay can prevent the rapid withdrawal of water from soil and more time for water to be available to plant. Barley is one of the crops tolerant to drought so its yield evaluation and yield components of different genotype and moisture condition to drought stress can be examined. This study was conducted to evaluate the effect of irrigation regimes and soil treatments for water retention in a course-texture soils on yield, yield components and water use efficiency of Nosrat and Valfajr genotypes of barley. The experiment performed at the cropping year of 1393-94 in Chah Anari research farm, Isfahan University of Technology. The experiment was Double-split plot in randomized complete block designed with three replications. In this experiment, two levels of 100 and 80 percent of irrigation as main plots and four water retention treatments include super-absorbent, plastic membrane and bentonite clay and control as sub plots and the two genotypes as sub-sub plots. The effect of drought stress on plant height, number of tillers, seed weight and biological yield was significant. Although the drought stress reduced height, the number of tillers, seed weight and biological yield 8, 13, 8.4 and 16 percent compared with the control irrigation respectively, but generally reduced all of the barley traits measured in this experiment. The effect of water retention treatments on all traits except number of grains per spike was significant. Superabsorbent treatment had the most effect on increasing the height, the number of grains per spike, grain yield, biological yield and water use efficiency in plants compared to the control (4.4, 8.1, 12.7, 21 and 12.3 percent respectively). However superabsorbent with increasing plant population per unit area reduced the number of tillers and spikes per plant than other treatments (i.e. water retentiones). The results of the bentonite retention treatment in most of the traits kept close to the no treatment control. The plastic membrane treatment resulted similar to the other treatments, but in most of the traits specifically in terms of seed yield and water use efficiency, was less than the other water retention treatments. The effect of genotype on seed yield, biological yield and water use efficiency was significantly higher for Nosrat genotypes compared to Valfajr around 18.7, 13.1, and 16.33 percent respectively. The superabsorbent treatment showed the most water use efficiency as compared to other treatments. Keywords: drought stress, water retention, barley, yield, water use efficiency