The world needs
better toilet maps.
ToiletNearest.com is a free global directory of public toilets, built on data that anyone can contribute to and anyone can use. No app required. No account. No fee.
A problem that sounds trivial and is not
Finding a public toilet sounds like one of life's smaller challenges. And for most people, most of the time, it is manageable - you duck into a coffee shop, ask at reception, or spot a sign in a shopping centre. You get a bit stressed, maybe embarrassed, but you sort it.
For a lot of people, though, the calculus is different. A parent travelling with a toddler who cannot hold it. A wheelchair user who needs a facility with grab bars on the left side, not just any accessible cubicle. A person with Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, or a stoma who needs access now - not in five minutes when the nearest coffee shop opens. An elderly traveller in an unfamiliar city. A child at a theme park. Someone with type 1 diabetes experiencing a hypoglycaemic episode.
For these people and millions of others, not knowing where the next toilet is - or arriving to find it locked, broken, or entirely absent - is not a small inconvenience. It shapes whether they can travel, whether they can work, and whether they can participate in public life at all.
When we looked at what existed to help them, we found: a small number of city-specific apps (useful only in their city, usually unmaintained), paid directories behind app store downloads, and a handful of national datasets in formats that were only useful if you were a developer.
The database already existed. OpenStreetMap's volunteers had tagged over 4 million public toilet facilities worldwide - with hours, access information, fees, and accessibility status. Nobody had made that data genuinely easy to use. That is what ToiletNearest.com does.
Live data coverage
4 million locations. 195 countries.
Where the data actually comes from
There is no proprietary database behind ToiletNearest.com. The toilet data is entirely open - you can see it, contribute to it, and correct it.
OpenStreetMap - the world's largest open geographic database
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a volunteer-built map of the world with over 10 billion data points. Volunteer contributors tag public toilets using the standardised amenity=toilets key, adding attributes like opening hours, fee status, wheelchair access, baby changing provision, and more. Over 50,000 people worldwide have contributed toilet data to OSM.
The Overpass API - queried live, not cached for weeks
We query the Overpass API - the read-only access layer for OSM data - in real time when you search. Three mirror servers run in parallel, and the first valid response within the search radius is returned. Results are cached for 10 minutes server-side, so the data you see is never more than 10 minutes old.
Government open data - for regions where OSM coverage is thin
Some countries maintain their own official toilet databases - Australia's National Public Toilet Map (19,000+ verified locations), Transport for London's facility data, and Singapore's NEA public amenity register. We incorporate these into our seed dataset for areas where OSM coverage is incomplete, clearly supplementing rather than replacing OSM data.
You can improve it - permanently, globally
Every toilet marker links to the underlying OpenStreetMap node. If a facility is missing, wrong, or has changed, you can edit it in OSM directly - using the iD web editor in a browser. That correction flows through to every application that uses OSM data, not just ours. This is the fundamental advantage of open data.
What the filters mean in practice
Each filter on the map corresponds to specific OpenStreetMap tag values - not estimates or guesses. Here is what each one actually checks:
| Filter | OSM tag checked |
|---|---|
| 🟢 Free | fee=no or charge=no |
| ♿ Wheelchair | wheelchair=yes or =limited |
| 🍼 Baby Changing | baby_changing=yes |
| 🕐 Open 24 Hours | opening_hours=24/7 or contains midnight–midnight |
| 🚻 Gender Neutral | unisex=yes or gender=unisex |
What happens to your location - nothing, and here is why
When you tap "Near Me", your device's geolocation API returns your coordinates to your browser. Those coordinates are then sent to our API to fetch nearby toilets from the Overpass servers. That is the entire transaction.
We do not store your coordinates. We do not log search queries against user accounts (there are no user accounts). We do not serve targeted advertising based on location. The API call is stateless: it happens, returns a result, and leaves no trace on our end.
This is not a privacy policy technicality - it is a product decision. The purpose of ToiletNearest.com is to help you find a toilet. Your location is a tool we use to do that, not a dataset we collect.
Who we built this for - in order
The initial user we designed ToiletNearest.com for was the person with a medical condition that makes toilet access genuinely time-sensitive. IBD patients, ostomates, elderly travellers with reduced bladder control, people with diabetes, and parents of very young children all share a common problem: the gap between "I need a toilet" and "I have found a clean, open, accessible toilet" can matter enormously.
Wheelchair users and their carers were the second priority. The wheelchair filter is not a nice-to-have feature - it is foundational. A facility marked wheelchair accessible and then found to be inaccessible (locked NKS cubicle, broken hoist, door too narrow for a powerchair) is worse than no facility at all because it wasted the time spent getting there.
The broader traveller was third. Most people visiting an unfamiliar city, on foot with a full day ahead of them, genuinely benefit from knowing where the nearest free, open public toilet is - without having to enter a shop and make an awkward request, without paying, without downloading another app. We wanted ToiletNearest.com to be the fastest and least embarrassing way to solve that problem.
Data sources and acknowledgements
Primary database. CC BY-SA 2.0 licence. All toilet nodes sourced via Overpass API.
Government-maintained database of 19,000+ verified facilities across Australia.
Community-maintained UK toilet database used to supplement OSM data.