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Low flows can impact water use and instream ecology. Therefore, reliable predictions of low‐flow metrics are crucial. In this study, we assess which catchment characteristics (climate, topography, geology and landcover) can explain the spatial variability of low‐flow metrics at two different scales: the regional scale and the small headwater catchment scale. For the regional‐scale analysis, we calculated the mean 7‐day annual minimum flow (q_min), the mean of the flow that is exceeded 95% of the year (q₉₅), and the master recession constant (C) for 280 independent gauging stations across the Swiss Plateau and the Swiss Alps for the 2000–2018 period. We assessed the relation between 44 catchment characteristics and the three low‐flow metrics based on correlation analysis and a random forest model. Low‐flow magnitudes across the Swiss Plateau were positively correlated with the fraction of the area …