The Best & Worst Public Bathrooms in America

The idea

Everyone has a public bathroom horror story. We turned that universal grievance into a measurable, rankable dataset: a survey of 3,000 Americans asking them to rate the public restrooms in their state on a scale of 1–10, plus follow-ups on what bothers them most.

The result was a story with a built-in local angle for all 50 states. A reporter in Harrisburg gets "Pennsylvania's bathrooms are among America's worst." A drive-time host in Bozeman gets "Here's how Montana can fix its restrooms." Same dataset, fifty different headlines.

What the data said

Americans rated their state's public restrooms at 5.2 out of 10 on average. Cleanliness was the top complaint — dirty toilets, overflowing trash cans, and that unmistakable odor — followed by lack of privacy, missing supplies, and broken fixtures.

Wyoming took the dubious honor of worst in the nation at 3.5/10, with New Hampshire (3.8) and Montana (4.0) close behind. At the other end, Vermont residents rated their restrooms a national-best 8.0/10.

How it traveled

We pitched localized angles to newspapers, radio stations, and TV newsrooms market by market. The campaign earned 56 media placements spanning Patch, PennLive, FOX 43, WFLA News Channel 8, the San Antonio Express-News, and dozens of drive-time radio shows across Texas, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota — every one crediting The Bathroom Bureau's research.