Most people meet a portable restroom as a rented plastic unit on a job site, but operations that need facilities month after month quickly discover the math flips toward owning, and toward a much better class of hardware. This guide covers the types, the costs, and what placement actually requires.
Single portable units, the familiar plastic cabins, are cheap to rent, unpleasant at scale, and need constant pump-out service. Container-based restroom blocks, what we stock in portable bathrooms, are plumbed, ventilated multi-stall facilities in a steel shell: real fixtures, running water, lighting, and a door that locks like a building because it is one.
Renting is right for a weekend event. But rental invoices recur forever, a facility needed beyond a season usually pays for itself as a purchase, and the unit holds resale value when the project ends. We ran the full numbers in our rent-vs-buy analysis; the short version is that ownership tends to win anywhere a restroom stands for months, not days.
A restroom block needs a level pad, a water feed, power for lighting and ventilation, and a sewer or holding-tank connection, the same hookups as a small building, all detailed per unit on our product pages. Delivery and placement are free to all 50 states, and every unit lists its real price with our standard full-refund protection on damaged, defective or not-as-described units.
Yes, parks, yards, farms and venues run container restroom blocks as permanent facilities; steel shells outlast site-built restrooms at a fraction of construction cost.
A working rule: one stall per 10-12 people on site full-time. Event peaks need more, check each listing's stall count and layout.
Insulated and heated configurations exist for year-round northern use, look for insulation notes on the listing or ask us.