We Read 1,976 Porta Potty Company Websites. 3% Publish a Price.

Every cost guide on the internet says a standard porta potty runs $75 to $150 a month. None of them says where the number comes from, and our measurement says it is wrong. This page is the study: what we read, what operators charge, and why the repeated figure misses low.

Method and data kept current; figures update regularly. Full methodology · Dataset (CC-BY)

Finding one: almost nobody publishes a price

Of the 1,976 independent operator websites we crawled and read, 58 publish any rental rate at all. That is 3%. Portable sanitation is priced on the phone, because the servicing schedule and the drive to your site move the number more than the unit does. Any guide quoting a national figure is working from a very small window, and so are we, which is why every number below names its sample.

Finding two: the repeated figure misses low

The range the industry quotes at itself is $75 to $150 a month for a standard unit. Measured across the operators who post a rate, a standard unit runs $110 to $170 a month (median $140, from 17 companies). The repeated range's midpoint sits below the measured 25th percentile: a customer walking in with the internet's number is anchored under what the market actually charges.

The gap has a mechanism. While assembling the measured table we found cost pages, including one of the most-cited, whose monthly column was the weekly column multiplied by four. That is not how any rental is priced: a month always discounts against a week, because delivery and collection cost the same either way. Multiply a weekly rate by four and you overstate the month; average that error against stale figures copied guide-to-guide for years and the published consensus stops describing the market.

What operators charge

A cell appears only where at least six companies publish a rate and the 75th percentile sits within three times the 25th. Sample sizes are companies, not quotes, one figure per company.

Finding three: an accessible unit is not a given

ADA-accessible units are the one line item on this list that is often not optional: a public event that provides restrooms is generally expected to provide an accessible one, and on many job sites it is a condition of the contract. So it is worth knowing that 55% of the operators we read name an accessible unit on their own website. The rest may well own one. They are not telling anybody they do, which for a planner working down a search results page amounts to the same thing.

The state spread is wider than the national figure suggests. In Kansas, 79% of operators name an ADA unit. In Kentucky it is 20%, from 15 operators read. That is a 4-fold difference in how likely you are to find an accessible unit advertised, between two states in the same country under the same federal rules.

Read from operator websites, so this measures what companies advertise rather than what sits in the yard. A blank is not proof of absence. It is proof that somebody searching cannot tell.

Finding four: the fleet thins out fast past the standard unit

Standard units are everywhere, which is why nobody searches for them. What people actually search for is the specific thing: the trailer for a wedding, the accessible unit for a public event, the hand-wash station a health inspector will ask about. Those thin out quickly. Restroom trailers are the best covered of the specialty units at 57% of operators, and shower trailers the least at 13%.

The practical consequence is that for anything other than a standard unit, the question is not what it costs but who within range has one. That is the thing no cost guide can answer and the reason this site indexes fleets rather than prices.

What we cannot tell you

Three limits, stated plainly, because a study that only lists its strengths is marketing.

The price table rests on a small number of operators, named in every row, because 3% of the industry publishes anything at all. Treat a median drawn from seven companies as a direction, not a settlement. Unit coverage is read from websites, so it measures what a company advertises; an operator with an accessible unit and a website that never mentions it counts as a blank here, and that is a real undercount we cannot size. And everything here describes independently owned operators, because the national chains are excluded by design, so it is not a picture of the whole market. It is a picture of the part of it a person actually chooses between.

How to use these numbers

As an anchor, not an answer. Your local figure moves with distance from the yard and the service schedule, so the working method is two or three quotes from the independent operators on your town page, each asked the same four things: the unit, the length of the rental, the service interval, and delivery. The measured table tells you whether the quotes you get are in the market's range.