How Porta Potty Finder Is Built
Everything below is what we actually do. If it changes, this page changes first.
Where the data comes from
We read each listed company's own website and records which unit types it says it rents (standard, flushing, ADA, restroom trailer, hand-wash station, shower trailer), along with the exact sentence the claim came from and the date we read it. We do not call for quotes and we do not estimate. The current edition covers 1,976 independent operators.
What counts
Independently owned portable sanitation companies in the United States. We exclude national carriers such as United Site Services and United Rentals, brokers who resell your booking, and the multi-state marketing networks that run a page per town off one website. Here is who, and why.
What we measure, and what we don't
We measure unit coverage: which kinds of unit each company actually rents. That is the field that decides whether a company can take your job, and it is the one no other directory collects. A blank against a company means its website does not name that unit, not that it can't supply one, so every figure on this site is printed next to the number of sites it was read from.
The standard unit is where the wording of the test matters most. Practically every yard runs them, but almost none writes "standard portable toilet" on a page already headed porta potty rental, so an early version of this measure required that exact phrase and returned 49%, which was a figure about our regex rather than about the trade. It now counts the generic phrasing too, because for this one unit the generic phrase is the claim: a company advertising porta potty rental is telling you it rents standard porta potties. It reads 87% on that basis.
The other five units are still matched on their specific names, and they should be. A trailer, a shower unit or an ADA cabin gets named because it is a premium item that sells, so the number is close to honest there. Read every one of them as how findable a unit is rather than how common it is; the measure earns its keep on the rare units, where being written down and being available line up.
We do not publish prices. Rates in this industry are quoted per job rather than posted, so where we show money it is stated as a typical industry range, never as a measured median. For a real number, two quotes from the independent yards on your town page beat any national average.
How the rates are measured
The same way everything else here is. We re-read the cached pages of all 1,976 operator websites we crawled and kept a price only where the billing period sat directly against the number and the unit type was identifiable from the surrounding text. Anything that turned out not to be a portable sanitation rental was discarded, and storage containers and dumpsters were the two things that most often looked like one.
Two distinctions do most of the work. We separate a rate a company publishes for itself from a range it quotes about the industry, because a page saying "portable toilets typically cost $100 to $300 a month" is telling you what its author read, not what that company charges, and only the first kind is counted. And we keep one figure per company, the lowest, so an operator with a tiered price list cannot outvote the rest of the sample.
A measured figure is published only where at least six companies name a price for that unit and period, and where the upper quartile sits within three times the lower one. That rule removes every restroom trailer figure we have, and it should: a two-station trailer and an eight-station trailer are different products, and the operators who do publish disagree by more than tenfold. An average across them would describe nothing real.
Where a unit has no measured figure, the page carries the trade's own reference range instead, always marked as an industry figure rather than one of ours. Those numbers are the ones repeated across published pricing guides. They carry no sample size and we did not verify them, which is precisely why they are labelled differently from everything else here. A measured figure always takes precedence where one exists, and the two are never mixed inside the same number.
What this buys is a number with a denominator. Every rate on this site is printed with the count of companies behind it, and those counts are small, between six and seventeen. That small count is the finding rather than a flaw in the method: almost nobody in this trade publishes a price, which is the reason the site exists.
How companies are ranked
Town pages order companies by an Index Score out of 100: review volume 30, rating 25, unit coverage 30, and 15 for contactability, being a website (7), a phone number (5) and an address (3). Unit coverage is weighted by rarity, because nearly every yard has a standard unit and few have a restroom trailer. Placement cannot be bought, and no listed company pays anything. A company moves up by earning reviews or by listing the units it rents.
Known limitations
- A company that does not describe its units online is under-counted here, even if its yard is well stocked. Claiming the listing fixes that.
- Service areas are estimated as a 25-mile radius from the company's address, not confirmed with the owner. Always check they cover you.
- Websites go stale. Every figure carries the date it was read, and coverage is thinner in rural states where fewer operators keep a detailed website.
Corrections
If anything here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. Claim the listing and say what it should be. Corrections are free and require nothing in return.
Reuse
Free to use and quote with attribution to Porta Potty Finder. CSV and JSON are published alongside it.
Updated regularly.