What to have ready before you call
Four answers get a real price out of us instead of a range. Everything else can wait.
- The address with cross streets. Not the borough, not the neighbourhood. A truck routing into Red Hook and a truck routing into Midtown are different days.
- Private property or public right of way. This one changes the timeline more than the other three combined, and the permit rules explain why.
- Dates, including the pickup date. Open-ended jobsite rentals are fine, we just bill them monthly instead.
- How many people, and for how long each day. For crews, OSHA 1926.51(c)(1) requires one toilet per 20 workers on a site running a 40-hour week, and the ratio steps up beyond that. For crowds, the working figure is one unit per 50 guests over four hours. The sizing calculator does both. OSHA 1926.51(f)(1) also requires washing facilities where workers handle harmful substances, so tell us what the crew is doing and not only how many of them there are.
If you would rather work from a printed list, the rental checklist is the same information in order.
How quickly do we answer, and how quickly can we deliver?
Quotes on a straightforward job come back the same working day. Delivery on private property in the five boroughs is usually same day or next day, because nothing has to be approved by anyone. That covers most of Staten Island, most of eastern Queens, and any placement inside a fenced site, a driveway, a yard or a private lot.
Street and sidewalk placements move at the permit's pace. A unit on a New York City street or sidewalk needs a permit from the Department of Transportation, approvals go through the borough offices, and turnaround runs from about a day to several weeks depending on the borough and the type of work. The NYC DOT Bureau of Permit Management and Construction Control at 55 Water Street runs that process, and 311 is the quickest route to an answer about a specific block.
For events between May and October, book two to four weeks out. Street fair and race season across the five boroughs concentrates a lot of demand onto a small number of Saturdays, and the trailers go first.
One thing worth knowing before you call: a standard unit is about 44 by 48 inches on manufacturer spec, with a 60 to 70 gallon holding tank underneath. That footprint is what decides whether a sidewalk, a parking space or a rear yard can actually take one, and it is the first measurement our dispatcher checks against your photo.
Something already went wrong on site
Call rather than emailing. Tanks that were meant to be serviced and were not, a unit knocked over on a live site, a shoot that added two days on Thursday afternoon. That is a normal week here and it has its own dispatch on emergency porta potty rental. Septic backups outside the sewered core, mostly Staten Island and the eastern edge of Queens, go through emergency septic service instead.
Storm and outage response is separate again, because it moves in convoys rather than single drops. That sits on disaster relief sanitation.
Questions we can answer faster than you can search
Some of these come up on nearly every first call, so they have their own pages.
- What it costs, broken down by unit, duration and fee, on the porta potty rental cost page
- Whether you need a permit, on porta potty permit requirements
- Where the unit can legally sit, on the placement guide. The 2010 ADA Standards set a 36 inch minimum clear width for a pedestrian access route in section 403.5.1, and a standard unit is about 44 inches wide, which rules out a lot of narrow sidewalks entirely
- How often it gets cleaned, on how often porta potties are cleaned. ANSI/PSAI Z4.3 sets weekly service as the minimum for a unit in normal use
- Whether it will smell, on do porta potties smell
- Everything else, on the FAQ
Are you inside our delivery area?
All five boroughs, plus a working radius of roughly 28 miles that reaches Hudson County, Newark and most of Nassau County. The service areas page lists every town with a real driving distance, from Hoboken at 9.9 miles to Levittown at 27.7 miles. Borough-level differences in access and price are on the New York City rental page.
If you are outside that ring, ask anyway. Long-term jobsite rentals sometimes still work, because one delivery covers months of use and the drive stops mattering.
Which team picks up your job
There is no separate events department and no separate construction department. The same trucks run construction site services, film set restrooms, wedding trailers and festival restrooms, which is why we can put a dumpster, a storage container, temporary fence and a handwashing station on one delivery instead of four.
Tell us if the order is public-facing, because that changes what goes on the truck. The 2010 ADA Standards section 213.2 exception 4 sets 5 percent of a cluster of portable toilets as the accessible share, with a minimum of one, so an accessible unit is part of any guest-facing bank whether or not it was on your list.
If the job is at Citi Field, Yankee Stadium, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Prospect Park or Randalls Island, tell us that first. Each of those sets its own service vehicle access rules and its own lead times, and their rules decide our schedule rather than the other way round.
Prefer to write it down
Use the online quote request. It asks for the same four things the phone call does, it takes about two minutes, and it means the address is spelled the way you meant it rather than the way someone heard it. Background on how we work is on the about page, and the home page lists every service line we run.
Next step
Get a delivery date
Tell us the address, the dates and the headcount. We size the order and confirm the route.