2024 Portable Toilet Rental Market Trends

Last year the worldwide portable toilet rental market was reportedly at $22.5 million. Industry analysts projected a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.0% from this year (2024) through the next 8 years up to 2033. In a nutshell, North America is expected to realize nearly 51% of that growth, with a vast percentage of it in the U.S. market. Chemical toilets are anticipated to account for 31% of the rental product market growth, and construction sites are expected to generate over 39% of the demand. But there’s much more to know about these numbers.

Top Trends in Global Portable Toilet Rental Market

The regional, national, and global trends that data analysts are seeing reflect an aggressively growing demand for luxury portable rental toilets for use at upscale events like weddings. The ever-growing preference for eco-safe solutions is shifting the industry toward chemical models and away from alternative unit types that involve much higher water use.

The vast growth in orders for both portable handwashing and hand sanitizing stations has outlasted the initial COVID-19 years. Those two rental service channels can be expected to remain strong through this year.

Worldwide Trends in Challenges for Toilet Rental Market

Trends in the challenges that local and regional competitors are facing this year include, above all, a more extremely competitive market environment. As newcomers enter the area, established providers must adapt and, in some cases, rebrand to maintain pricing and market share.

Operators in foreign regions face additional obstacles in the form of persistent accessibility issues. Those can be predicted to include poor availability and unaffordable pricing of raw materials for local manufacturing and/or for international production, shipping, and delivery of such large and numerous units to meet demand.

In both advanced economies and emerging markets alike, skilled labor shortages will persist in 2024. And, ever-stricter regulatory requirements on waste disposal to satisfy environmental protection mandates add to the growing range of difficulties in strategic management of portable restroom rental services.

Which Regions Lead the Portable Toilet Rental Market?

Across the worldwide portable toilet rental markets, these appear to be among the highest-use regions and highest-use countries in those regions:

North America: United States and Canada
Western Europe: Germany, France, and Italy
Eastern Europe: Russia and Turkey
Asia Mainland: China, India, and Japan
Eastern Pacific: Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, and Vietnam
Australia: New Zealand
South America: Columbia, Brazil, and Argentina
Middle East: Saudi Arabia and UAE
Africa: Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa

What is Driving the Explosive Growth of the Global Toilet Rental Industry?

The rapidly growing national and global demand for portable toilet rentals and associated sanitation products is currently driven by an array of factors. For example, in developed countries, the event industry is realizing increasingly strong growth, with reportedly more than 3 million events just last year. Construction in both prosperous and emerging markets is undergoing widespread development.

There are numerous additional components to the global market growth. We will list some of those below. However, the primary impetus stimulating virtually all other contributing growth sectors is the surging urbanization of so many outer bands of suburban areas and even more remote rural areas. Over 60% of the U.S. construction boom is concentrated in about 10 states. Those include California, New York, Texas, and Florida, and a half dozen others.

In existing metropolitan outer rings of cities in prosperous nations and now more quickly developing rural regions of underdeveloped countries, demand for sanitation services is rapidly trending. For example, abroad, vast development projects include, for example, Dubai’s Dubailand. Portable toilets have naturally become a central piece of the necessary temporary services package for so many, if not all, such large-scale enterprises.

The Booming American Toilet Rental Market 2024

The United States leads the worldwide portable toilet rental industry by a wide margin. There are many contributors to such frequency of usage throughout the country. Research projections support predictions of a CAGR of 6% from 2024 through 2032 to $38 million. Currently, the primary drivers of rental sales numbers in the U.S. are the vast size and robust activity of the country’s construction industry, worth a staggering $2.3 trillion, and the thriving event industry.

The ultra-modern portable toilets used in the US are eco-friendly, efficiently chemically breaking down waste, using minimal water. American portable toilet rental business owners benefit from these advanced innovations and the relative ease of scaling their operations in the bustling national market.

Construction: Portable toilets increase net worker productivity per day by saving downtime and increasing convenience.
Public Events: Massive seasonal outdoor sports competitions, musical concerts, arts and cultural festivals, and other regional events abound in the US. All require extensive banks of portable toilets.
Disaster Response: Portable toilets are now classed as essential services in many US states during natural disaster recovery across the US. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) often sends thousands of portable units to impacted areas.
Outdoor Recreation: The National Park Service recognizes the basic need for its many millions of annual visitors to parks throughout the country to have reliable convenient access to clean toilets at public parks, campgrounds, and conservation grounds.
Infrastructure Projects: Federal, state, and county highway construction across the country’s network of roads and pipelines has contributed much to the US portable restroom industry.
Agriculture: More than 2.6 million people in the U.S. work in agricultural environments. OSHA requirements call for farms to provide at least one toilet per 20 employees working in locations without permanent toilet housing near their work areas.
Entertainment Industry: The combined movie and TV industries employ a vast workforce totaling over 2 million people. Serving this industry means procuring portable restroom rentals at the rate of one toilet for every 20 employees on a given project.
OSHA Regulations: Federal regulations require the provision of restrooms for employees in any industry working under applicable conditions. Portable toilets onsite reduce the safety risk to workers and visitors by preventing the need to travel back and forth to an offsite toilet.

Underserved Toilet Rental Markets in Developing Countries

Around half of the world’s developing countries are undergoing urbanization. Less than a third have significant utilization rates of portable toilet services. These emerging commercial consumer markets present growth opportunities for portable toilet services. Only about half of these struggling populations have in place developed structures for the growth of sanitation facilities.

Economic struggles stifle the growth of portable toilet rental markets in countries where sanitation spending is reportedly as low as $3 per capita, vs. more than $100 in better-developed regions. The consequences are fewer and lower quality units and deficient maintenance services.

As a result, the value is only 40% of the cost of better quality rental products, growth is lagging due to this lack of market value, customer retention rates are very poor, reportedly frequently under 60%. Without more cohesive collaborative strategic growth planning, only a weak rate of about 25% of waste in underdeveloped nations is properly processed using appropriate health and safety practices.

Chemical Solutions Dominate Modern Toilet Rental Market

Chemical models have now captured above 31% of the global rental toilet market share. Chemical units offer users the benefits of a more hygienic and overall more pleasant experience. That is a key feature for attracting and retaining event customers and boosting job site workers’ motivation.

Portable chemical toilets are stand-alone facilities, independent of buildings on sites, easy to maintain, and cause nominal negative environmental impact. This bundle of exceptional benefits and the findings from external research findings account for consumer rankings that reveal users’ clear preferences of mechanism types in portable toilets:

Chemical
Composting
Container-Based
Bucket-Based
Incineration
Others

What Do the 2024 Trends Mean for US Portable Toilet Rentals?

In the big picture of the coming years in the global portable toilet rental market, a steady increase in utilization rates is anticipated across the US market from 2024 through year-end 2032. In the most general analysis of the global and US national data trends, it’s fair to say at least that such robust growth trends and projects for the United States and larger worldwide industry bode well for high-quality American operators with growth goals in 2024.