Restroom Design and Provision
Many resources can help you determine if your space or facility has enough public restrooms, and if those public restrooms are usable.
The American Restroom Association is currently developing new educational materials to help our stakeholders provide and build more, better, and more usable restrooms. In the meantime, we offer these suggestions for resources where you can learn more.
Restroom Provision
The minimum number of toilets you must provide will be determined by your local plumbing code. However, we suggest providing at least one restroom in any space, even when your code does not mandate it. This includes places where restrooms may not be mandatory, such as stores, parks, and coffee shops. Every workplace must have a toilet, or an opportunity to access a toilet.
We suggest providing no fewer than one toilet for every forty people, and ideally more. You can measure this by:
- Number of people in your workplace
- Number of people you can reasonably expect in a space
- Number of customers you can expect at one time
Make sure that the restroom is:
- Available to the public
- Kept clean, safe, and in good working order
- Easy to find
Restroom Design
Wherever possible, we recommend providing single-user, all-gender restrooms. We are developing customized materials to support this endeavor. We recommend consulting the following resources to help you design or build out a usable public restroom:
- Toilet room checklist from the New England ADA Center
- Toilet room guidelines from the United States Access Board
- Resources from the International Paruresis Association
- Sanitary facility standards from Accessibility Standards Canada – note that Canada’s proposed standards align with but do not exactly match those in the US
- Building Better Bathrooms, by Julie Sawchuk
Many providers, such as the Public Restroom Company and Throne, can also help you provide modular public restrooms in public spaces.