The Magellanic Clouds provide the only laboratory to study the effect of metallicity and galaxy mass on molecular gas and star formation at high ( \sim { 20 } pc ) resolution . We use the dust emission from HERITAGE Herschel data to map the molecular gas in the Magellanic Clouds , avoiding the known biases of CO emission as a tracer of H _ { 2 } . Using our dust-based molecular gas estimates , we find molecular gas depletion times ( \tau ^ { \textnormal { mol } } _ { \textnormal { dep } } ) of \sim { 0.4 } Gyr in the LMC and \sim { 0.6 } SMC at 1 kpc scales . These depletion times fall within the range found for normal disk galaxies , but are shorter than the average value , which could be due to recent bursts in star formation . We find no evidence for a strong intrinsic dependence of the molecular gas depletion time on metallicity . We study the relationship between gas and star formation rate across a range in size scales from 20 pc to \geq 1 kpc , including how the scatter in \tau ^ { \textnormal { mol } } _ { \textnormal { dep } } Â changes with size scale , and discuss the physical mechanisms driving the relationships . We compare the metallicity-dependent star formation models of Ostriker et al . ( 106 ) and Krumholz ( 85 ) to our observations and find that they both predict the trend in the data , suggesting that the inclusion of a diffuse neutral medium is important at lower metallicity .