Pursuit of highly active, stable and low-cost electrocatalysts for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is the key point for large-scale water splitting. A vanadium nanobelts coating on a nickel foam (V/NF) is proposed as an excellent 3D bifunctional electrode for water electrolysis here, which exhibits high activities with overpotentials of 292 and 176 mV at 10 mA cm(-2) for OER and HER, respectively. When employed as a bifunctional electrocatalyst in an alkaline water electrolyzer, a cell voltage of 1.80 V was required to achieve 20 mA cm(-2) with a slight increase during a 24 h durability test. The existence of the appropriate amount of nitrogen and oxygen elements in the surface region of vanadium nanobelts is regarded to be responsible for the electrocatalytic activity.