The State of the NYC Restroom
We put sensors on the door and watched. Here is the first ground-truth look at how a city actually goes.
The public restroom is the most-used, least-understood room in any building. Managers schedule cleanings by the clock, not by traffic. Owners hear about problems only when someone complains. The data that would fix this has never existed — because no one was counting.
Between January and July 2026, Yedi counted. We put smart locks on 73 restroom doors in cafés, pizzerias, bakeries and fast-food counters around New York, and logged every unlock the moment it happened. What follows is drawn from 2,763 verified unlocks — each one a real person who sought out a Yedi restroom and paid to get in. It is the first ground-truth portrait of restroom demand in an American city.
And one number frames the rest: where a business actually offers Yedi to its customers, a single restroom gets unlocked 30 to 45 times a month — and paid for nearly every time.
Here's what those unlocks reveal.
Jan 7 – Jul 26 2026
(unique payments)
Judge it where it's switched on
Yedi is installed on 73 doors — but about a third were mounted and never really offered to customers. Averaging those in buries the signal. The honest measure is the door that's actually in use: where a business puts Yedi in front of people, a single restroom is unlocked 30 to 45 times a month — one to one-and-a-half times a day, from a single door. Right now Haraz's men's room is unlocked 43 times a month; Think Coffee's SoHo shop, 36; Ray's Pizza, 26.
Each mark is a door · filled = unlocked in the last 90 days. The gap isn't weak demand — it's activation, the one lever Yedi controls.
The city goes on the weekend
Restroom demand isn't flat across the week — it swings. Saturday is the busiest day by a wide margin, with Sunday close behind. The mid-week lull bottoms out on Tuesday. Foot traffic, not the work calendar, drives the door.
Saturday runs 108% above the quietest weekday. Weekends alone account for 39% of all unlocks.
An afternoon rush, not a morning one
The demand curve builds through late morning, peaks in the early afternoon (around 1–2pm ET), and holds high straight through the dinner hour before falling off. The quietest stretch is 3–7am, when the network nearly flatlines. This is the shape of a commercial district living its day.
Aggregated across all 61 restrooms. The pre-dawn floor is near zero — restrooms sleep when the city does.
The average visit is 3 minutes, 42 seconds
Measured directly from the lock — door-close to door-open — the typical visit runs under four minutes. The median is even shorter, at 2 minutes 52 seconds, meaning most people are quicker than the average and a long tail pulls it up. It's the kind of number a cleaning schedule has never been able to see.
Door-open time from early lock telemetry — 210 de-duplicated sessions since late May. Most stays run 1 to 4 minutes.
Demand doesn't split down the middle
At the one venue running separate instrumented men's and women's rooms — Haraz Coffee House — the men's room saw 36% more unlocks than the women's over the same window. A single data point, but a provocative one: the assumption that restroom load is symmetric is exactly the kind of thing operators guess at and never measure.
Two doors, one location, same seven months. The gap is real and consistent — and invisible without instrumentation.
This is a habit, not a novelty
The easy dismissal of any new system is that people try it once. That's not what the data shows. 22 restrooms have logged 50 or more unlocks each — and together they account for 78% of all unlocks. Demand concentrates in places people return to, week after week.
Where New York goes
The busiest doors on the network read like a map of where the city actually stops. Coffee leads — and one chain leads coffee: Think Coffee alone accounts for roughly a third of every unlock, spread across seven-plus locations from SoHo to Tribeca.
Think Coffee locations shown in deep green. Across all 7+ sites, Think Coffee drives ~906 unlocks — about 33% of the network.
The single busiest day was Valentine's Day.
50 unlocks in 24 hours — the network's all-time high. Whatever New Yorkers were doing on February 14th, a lot of it ran through a restroom.
Facilities have been flying blind. This is what the ground looks like.
Every number here was invisible a year ago — the weekend swing, the afternoon peak, the 3-minute stay, the men's/women's gap, and 2,763 people paying to walk through a door that used to be free. That's the point. When you can see demand, you can clean on demand: staff the busy rooms, stop over-servicing the quiet ones, and prove the work got done. Vol. 01 is a first look at a few dozen doors. We're just getting started.
Methodology & notes
Figures come from Yedi's live access network between January 7 and July 26, 2026 (199 days). An "unlock" is a successful, authorized restroom access, logged server-side the moment Yedi opens the door: 2,763 successful unlocks against 10 failed attempts — a 99.6% first-try success rate — with 2,743 each tied to a unique customer payment. In this system access is unlock, so this server-side record — not the lock's own telemetry — is the complete, de-duplicated count of entries, and the basis for every headline number. Coverage spans 73 installed doors across independent cafés, pizzerias, bakeries and quick-service restaurants in New York City; about 50 of those doors were unlocked at least once in the trailing 90 days ("active"), and per-active-door run-rates are computed over the trailing 30.
Time-inside figures (average 3:42, median 2:52) are measured from lock telemetry — how long a door stays open — across 210 de-duplicated sessions recorded since late May 2026, when session logging came online. That hardware feed is early and partial, so it is used only for duration, never for the unlock count. Hour-of-day figures are converted to Eastern Time. A logging gap in April 2026 excludes that month from time-series views but not from totals. The men's/women's comparison reflects a single venue with separately instrumented rooms and is offered as illustration, not a citywide claim. Venue names appear with operator awareness.