In view of the problems of traditional prepaid meters such as inefficiency and inconvenience, a Near Field Communication (NFC)-enabled water meter system that has the functions of mobile payment and data query was proposed. Firstly, according to the business requirements of the prepaid water meter, the overall architecture of the water meter system was developed based on NFC technology, and the software and hardware were designed. Secondly, a low-power mechanism which was used to wake up the water meter by detecting the external magnetic field changes was proposed. Finally, the security performance in mobile payment of the water meter system was analyzed based on NFC security protocols. The experimental results show that users can dynamically awake the water meter system, and utilize the functions of mobile payment, data querying and data uploading, by using the NFC mobile phones or other mobile terminals with NFC module.