How and when Ohio homes got indoor plumbing

The Census Bureau's 1940 count found 26.0 percent of Ohio dwelling units with an outside toilet or privy, and on Ohio farms fewer than one home in six had a bathtub or shower of its own. Within fifty years almost all of that had gone. This page follows the change decade by decade in the Census Bureau's own figures, alongside what came before it in Columbus: the privy vaults, the typhoid years, the sanitary privies built by federal work-relief crews, and the bath houses of the era when the tub was not in the house. It also explains why the figure published today is not comparable with the old ones.

Last updated September 2026 · Figures are the Census Bureau's, the Federal Works Agency's and the city's own, read September 2026 · No prices on this page; the Estimate Builder carries those · Part of the knowledge base

The record is the census, and it begins in 1940

There is one continuous account of when Ohio homes got plumbing, and it is the census. The Census Bureau counts a home as having complete plumbing facilities when it has hot and cold piped water, a bathtub or shower, and a flush toilet. In every census from 1940 through 1980 those facilities also had to be for the exclusive use of the people living in the unit, and the Census Bureau dropped that requirement in 1990. Everything earlier and everything alongside it is patchier: city health reports, work-relief records, photographs in a state archive. This page uses those too, and says which is which.

The 1940 census measured the building rather than the bathroom, and that is the single most misread thing about its figures. Its own definitions say a dwelling unit was recorded as having a bathtub or shower if the equipment was supplied with running water, not necessarily hot water, and was available in the structure. A flush toilet counted if it was in the structure. So a cold-water tub down a hallway counted, and the tables record separately whether it was shared or the household's own.

Ohio in 1940: a quarter of homes with the toilet outdoors

In the 1940 census, 67.2 percent of Ohio dwelling units reporting toilet facilities had a flush toilet in the structure for their exclusive use, and 5.7 percent shared one. The same 1940 census put another 26.0 percent in an outside toilet or privy, and 0.8 percent with no toilet or privy at all. Nationally the outside toilet or privy share in the 1940 census was 32.2 percent, so Ohio was better supplied than the country as a whole.

Bathing was counted separately. The 1940 census put 62.7 percent of Ohio dwelling units reporting bathing equipment as having a bathtub or shower for their exclusive use, against 56.2 percent nationally, and 629,030 of the 1,953,836 Ohio units reporting, 32.2 percent, had none anywhere in the structure, against 39.1 percent nationally. Both figures are worked from the same table's own dwelling-unit counts.

The state average hides the thing that mattered most, which was where the house stood. In the 1940 census the share of Ohio dwelling units with a private bath was 79.3 percent in urban areas, 37.3 percent in rural nonfarm areas and 16.6 percent on farms. In the same 1940 census, private flush toilets ran 39.6 percent rural nonfarm and 16.7 percent on farms. On those 1940 census figures, five Ohio farm homes in six had no private flush toilet, in a state whose towns were already ahead of the national average.

The fall, decade by decade

From 1940 the Census Bureau published the same measure every ten years: the number and share of housing units lacking complete plumbing facilities, meaning the unit did not have all three of hot and cold piped water, a bathtub or shower, and a flush toilet. In 1940 the Census Bureau counted 709,351 Ohio housing units lacking complete plumbing facilities, 38.1 percent of the state's homes, against 45.3 percent nationally. The table below is that series exactly as the Census Bureau's historical housing tables print it.

Ohio sits below the national figure in every one of those six censuses, so nobody should describe the state as having lagged. The steepest single decade is the 1950s, when the Census Bureau's Ohio share fell from 28.9 percent to 12.8 percent. The last column needs two cautions in the same breath as the number: 1990 is the first year the Census Bureau measured without the exclusive-use requirement, and the series ends there because the figures the Census Bureau publishes now come from a survey that stopped asking about the flush toilet in 2016. The last section of this page sets the old measure and the new one side by side; they are not the same question and they do not belong on the same line.

The shape is regional rather than particular to Ohio. The Census Bureau puts the whole Midwest at 47 percent lacking complete plumbing in 1940 and 1 percent in 1990. What stayed behind was rural: in 1990 the Census Bureau still found 3 percent of rural housing units nationally lacking complete plumbing against fewer than 1 percent in urban areas, and it attributed what remained to older housing in rural areas.

Columbus before the plant: the privy vault, and the typhoid years

Columbus dealt with the privy vault long before it dealt with the bathroom. In the report the city health officer filed with the Ohio State Board of Health for 1890, the rule was that a privy vault in the city had to be built with walls and bottom of brick or stone at least eight inches thick and be watertight when finished. No vault could be built on a property fronting a street or alley that already carried a sewer. That is a displacement rule rather than an abolition: an existing vault could stay, and where the sewer had arrived no new one could take its place.

The same report shows the scale of the upkeep. Among the nuisances Columbus abated in the year it covers were 1,186 vaults whose contents were removed and 357 more disinfected or flushed. No campaign to eliminate the city's vaults, and no date for one, could be found in any source this page was able to open, so none is stated here. The 1890 rule and those counts are what the record holds.

The subject never entirely closed. The Columbus City Health Code still carries a provision for it: section 221.01(q) treats a pit privy no longer in use as a hazard on any premises in the city, developed or undeveloped, to be filled, sealed or fenced. That is Columbus alone; another municipality or county health district may handle the same thing differently.

What bad water did to the city is on the record in the Census Bureau's mortality bulletins, and every typhoid figure on this page comes from those bulletins rather than from any later history. The Census Bureau counted 57 typhoid fever deaths in Columbus in 1907, a rate of 38.3 per 100,000 people, and 168 in 1908, a rate of 110.5. Writing about 1908, the Census Bureau said that no state reached a rate of 50 and that only two large cities did: Denver at 54.8 and Columbus at 110.5.

The following year the Census Bureau counted 33 typhoid deaths in Columbus, a fall of 135 from 1908, and wrote that the greatest relative decrease among the large cities was in Columbus, where the disease had been epidemic in 1908. The City of Columbus says its Scioto River water purification plant was completed in 1908. This page sets those facts beside one another and stops: the mortality bulletins name no cause, and the plant, what it does to the water and who drinks it belong to the page on where Columbus water comes from. Where the water goes afterward is the subject of the page on the sewers, then and now.

The privy, built by the tens of thousands

While the cities were sewering, the country was being given a better privy. Federal work-relief crews built 69,796 sanitary privies in Ohio, on the count the Federal Works Agency published for the whole program through June 30, 1943, and 2,309,239 across the country. That is the federal agency's figure for its own program. No Ohio Department of Health count of privies built in this state could be found, so nothing here is credited to the state, and the agency that ran the work was renamed part way through, which is why the whole-program total is the federal agency's rather than any single administration's.

The program is visible in Ohio's own archives. Ohio Memory, published by the Ohio History Connection with the State Library of Ohio, carries New Deal photographs that include a sanitary privy campaign in Zanesville carried out with work-relief labor. Those are privies, not bathrooms, and more than two million of them nationally is a plain measure of how far indoor plumbing had not reached by the early 1940s.

When the tub was not in the house

Where a home had no tub, an Ohio city could supply one. The City of Cleveland ran public bath houses from 1904 to 1954, opened because much of its housing had no bathing facility. Cleveland Historical, published by Cleveland State University, says an 1899 survey found one bathtub for every 600 Cleveland homes. Case Western Reserve University's Encyclopedia of Cleveland History says the city closed the last of them in 1954, because bathtubs in the home had become widely available.

That is Cleveland, not Central Ohio. Nothing equivalent for Columbus could be found in any source this page was able to open, so this page does not say whether Columbus ran public bath houses. The Cleveland record is here because two universities document it and because its dates line up with the census series above: the last city bath house closed in 1954, between the Census Bureau's 1950 count, when 28.9 percent of Ohio housing units lacked complete plumbing, and its 1960 count, when 12.8 percent did.

How people bathe now, and the rules that shaped the fixtures

There is no Ohio measurement of how households actually use water. The most detailed study in public is the Water Research Foundation's Residential End Uses of Water, Version 2, published in 2016, and every figure in this section is national: it metered single-family homes at 23 participating utilities in the United States and Canada, and none of them is in Ohio. In that study showers were 20 percent of indoor household water use, about 26.9 gallons a day per home, and baths were 3 percent. The study's own summary says toilet flushing, not showering, is the largest indoor use of water in single-family homes.

The same study found the average shower lasted 7.8 minutes, unchanged from the 1999 study it repeated. In a sub-sample of 94 homes it found showers took 39.1 percent of all the hot water a household used, the largest single share, with faucets next. On those national numbers a shower is about a fifth of a household's water and about two fifths of its hot water.

The fixtures themselves were set by federal law in the same period. Under 42 U.S.C. 6295(j), a showerhead manufactured after January 1, 1994 is limited to 2.5 gallons a minute measured at 80 pounds per square inch. Under the following subsection, 6295(k), a gravity tank-type toilet manufactured after that same date is limited to 1.6 gallons a flush. Both limits were added to federal law by the Energy Policy Act of 1992. A Central Ohio house plumbed before 1994 was not built to either figure, so an untouched fixture of that age predates the standard a new one is made to. That is an inference from the dates in the law, not a measurement of any particular house.

Where Ohio stands now, and why the number reads higher

In the Census Bureau's 2024 American Community Survey five-year estimates, 104,442 of Ohio's 5,292,391 housing units lacked complete plumbing facilities, about 2.0 percent, and in that survey complete plumbing facilities means only hot and cold running water and a bathtub or shower inside the unit, because the Census Bureau stopped asking whether a home has a flush toilet in 2016. The 0.8 percent the Census Bureau recorded for Ohio in the 1990 census answered a different question. The Census Bureau also warns in its own subject definitions that survey plumbing figures from 2008 onward should not be compared with earlier survey figures or with the 2000 census, and attributes the break to changes in the wording and the response options. Read as two questions rather than one series, nothing in the pair says Ohio housing went backward.

The rest of the current picture, from the same Census Bureau table and on the same definition: nationally 2,442,443 of 143,775,355 housing units lacked complete plumbing facilities, about 1.7 percent, and in Franklin County 6,851 of 595,469 housing units did, about 1.2 percent. Franklin County is the lowest of the three figures, and all three are estimates carrying a stated margin of error rather than a count of every house.

Where a tub-to-shower conversion sits in this history

Two things on this page turn up inside Central Ohio bathrooms. The first is that a great many houses here were plumbed after they were built. In the 1940 census a quarter of Ohio dwelling units still had the toilet outdoors and about a third had no bathtub or shower anywhere in the structure, so a pre-war house with a bathroom in it today most likely got one as a retrofit. That is an inference from the census shares and the age of the housing, not a record of any particular address, and it is the plainest explanation for why the bathroom in an old house is often the smallest room in it and why its supply and waste lines take strange routes through closets and stairwells. How many bathrooms those houses had by the 1980 count, the last one any government took, is on the bathrooms by decade page.

The second is that the 1940 census counted a tub with running water anywhere in the structure, hot or not, which is a useful check on the sentence "it has always had a bathroom." It may always have had one. It very likely did not always have this one, in this room, with hot water. A tub-to-shower conversion in a house of that age is the same room being re-plumbed once more, in a sequence that started when the house first got running water at all. What that work involves is set out on the page about tub-to-shower conversions in Columbus. What the bathroom held, era by era, once the plumbing arrived, is on the bathroom page.

Sources

Every figure, date and quotation on this page comes from one of these documents, read on the date given. Where two of them disagree, the page says so.

• US Census Bureau, Historical Census of Housing Tables: Plumbing, undated; read September 2026.
• US Census Bureau, 1940 Census of Housing, Volume II: General Characteristics, Part 1, United States Summary (definitions and Tables 40 to 43), 1943; read September 2026.
• US Census Bureau, Plumbing Facilities, 1940 to 1990, by state (data file plumbing-tab.txt), undated; read September 2026.
• US Census Bureau, We asked... You told us: Complete Plumbing and Kitchen Facilities (CQC-25), 1990; read September 2026.
• US Census Bureau, 2024 American Community Survey Subject Definitions, Plumbing Facilities, 2025; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Annual Report of the State Board of Health of the State of Ohio (1890), municipal returns, Columbus entry, 1890; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Columbus Public Health, Columbus City Health Code, section 221.01(q), December 11, 2025; read September 2026.
• US Census Bureau, Bulletin 104. Mortality Statistics: 1908, 1910; read September 2026.
• US Census Bureau, Bulletin 108. Mortality Statistics: 1909, 1911; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Water Treatment History, Department of Public Utilities, undated; read September 2026.
• Federal Works Agency, Work Projects Administration, Final Report on the WPA Program, 1935 to 1943, Table XVIII, 1946; read September 2026.
• Ohio Memory, Ohio History Connection and the State Library of Ohio, End of an ERAA: The WPA Years in Ohio, June 30, 2017; read September 2026.
• Cleveland Historical, Center for Public History and Digital Humanities, Cleveland State University, Lincoln Park Baths, undated; read September 2026.
• Case Western Reserve University, Bath Houses, Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, undated; read September 2026.
• Water Research Foundation, Residential End Uses of Water, Version 2: Executive Report, April 2016; read September 2026.
• Office of the Law Revision Counsel, US House of Representatives, 42 U.S.C. 6295, Energy conservation standards, subsections (j) and (k), undated; read September 2026.
• US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2024 five-year estimates, table-based summary file, table B25047, January 29, 2026; read September 2026.

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