Toilet jokes aside, the average person visits the toilet 2,500 times a year, which averages to about 6-8 times a day. All in all, you will spend three years of your life sitting on the toilet (or possibly more if you like to read/watch movies while you take care of your business).
Needless to say, we can assume that the smallest room in the house is also one of the most essential rooms in the house…which begs the question: Is it essential enough to make sure everyone under the same roof has their own personal bathroom OR should your family just adopt a “share and share alike” policy when it comes to visiting the “comfort room”?
Well, as it turns out, for whatever reason – be it a regional preference (as in everything’s big in Texas) or generation gap (what can we say, older homes tend to be smaller and have fewer bathrooms) – where you live can dictate how many bathrooms per bedrooms you’ll likely get in your home.
Yup, it’s true. We made this discovery a few weeks ago when we crunched some numbers to see where you can find homes for sale with the most bathrooms per bedroom. Check out the results below – do you live in heavily-bathroomed place?
Share a Bathroom Here? No Way Jose!
| # | U.S. Metro | Bathroom-to-Bedroom Ratio |
| 1 | Raleigh–Cary, NC MSA | 1.07 |
| 2 | Las Vegas–Paradise, NV MSA | 1.00 |
| 3 | West Palm Beach–Boca Raton–Boynton Beach, FL MSA | 1.00 |
| 4 | Atlanta–Sandy Springs–Marietta, GA MSA | 0.98 |
| 5 | Charlotte–Gastonia–Rock Hill, NC-SC MSA | 0.96 |
| 6 | Nashville–Davidson–Murfreesboro–Franklin, TN | 0.96 |
| 7 | Fort Lauderdale–Pompano Beach–Deerfield Beach, FL MSA | 0.95 |
| 8 | Miami–Miami Beach–Kendall, FL MSA | 0.95 |
| 9 | Dallas–Plano–Irving, TX MSA | 0.95 |
| 10 | Phoenix–Mesa–Glendale, AZ MSA | 0.94 |
You Best Be Willing to Share a Bathroom Here
| # | U.S. Metro | Bathroom-to-Bedroom Ratio |
| 1 | Pittsburgh, PA MSA | 0.72 |
| 2 | New York–White Plains–Wayne, NY-NJ Metro Division | 0.73 |
| 3 | Oklahoma City, OK MSA | 0.73 |
| 4 | Oakland–Fremont–Hayward, CA MSA | 0.74 |
| 5 | Cleveland–Elyria–Mentor, OH MSA | 0.75 |
| 6 | Detroit–Livonia–Dearborn, MI Metro Division | 0.77 |
| 7 | Buffalo–Niagara Falls, NY MSA | 0.77 |
| 8 | Sacramento–Arden–Arcade–Roseville, CA MSA | 0.78 |
| 9 | San Francisco–San Mateo–Redwood City, CA Metro Division | 0.78 |
| 10 | Milwaukee–Waukesha–West Allis, WI MSA | 0.78 |
While this is an interesting set of lists, we couldn’t help but wonder if home sizes played a role. So we plotted out all the U.S metros that we looked at on a graph, comparing its bathroom-to-bedroom ratio with the average square footage.
Box 1: In what I like to call beach/vacation towns (Las Vegas, Orlando, Santa Ana and San Diego) is where you’ll likely get a smaller house with more bathrooms than you know what to do with.
Box 2: In the south and armpit of America (Atlanta, Nashville, New Brunswick and Virginia Beach) is where you’ll likely get a bigger home with lots of bathrooms. Score!
Box 3: In NorCal and the Big Apple (San Jose, Sacramento, New York and Oakland) is where you’re going to get the short end of the stick – small house and not a lot of bathrooms.
Box 4: In a mismatch group of places (Rochester, Memphis, Nassau and Newark), expect a big house but not a lot of bathrooms.
So there you have it. If having a more favorable bathroom-to-bedroom ratio is #1 on your list of must-haves the next time you’re out house hunting, consider buying a home in Jersey or the South. Likewise, if you’re a big believer in sharing is caring, then head on over to the SF Bay Area or New York.
And now let’s ask the audience – how important is having a LOT of bathrooms in your home?
Methodology: If you’re so mathematically inclined, here’s a quick and dirty explanation on how we calculated the bathroom-to-bedroom ratio. In the 60 largest U.S. metros based on population size, we looked at all the 2-bedroom homes for sale on Trulia.com. We then counted up all the bathrooms in these properties. (FYI, all 2-bedroom homes will have at least 1 bathroom and can in some odd cases, as many as 3 bathrooms. We know, it’s weird…but it happens). We then divided the total number of bathrooms by the total number of bedrooms in a metro and….*drum roll*… ta-da! That’s how we get the bathroom-to-bedroom ratio.
