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Ask a landlord what improves a bathroom and you’ll usually hear about tiles, taps and a new suite. Ask a tenant and the list looks different.

Research by Simply Business, which asked renters what they value most, found the two things renters want most from a bathroom are both more hidden aspects. Good ventilation came top of the bathroom wish list at 41%, with water pressure coming very close behind. A bathtub took third place, whilst modern fixtures, which is where most refurbishment budgets go, managed 21%. 

Landlord instinct and tenant priority are close to inverted here, which is worth understanding before signing off a refurbishment budget. It doesn’t mean a smart-looking bathroom is wasted money, but it does mean the things that make a bathroom work get decided earlier, and cost far less to get right than to fix later.

The upgrade that gets skipped

Ventilation may be top of the tenant list, but often comes much lower on the refurbishment plan. It’s invisible, unglamorous, and yet the component most likely to produce a damp complaint eighteen months after the work is finished.

The standard is clear enough. Approved Document F sets a minimum extract rate of 15 litres per second for an intermittent fan in a bathroom, a figure carried over unchanged into the 2026 edition that takes effect next March.

The guidance also expects the fan no more than 400mm below the ceiling, using rigid duct wherever possible with any flexible run kept to a maximum length of 1.5m, and a 15 minute overrun in a room with no openable window. Those are the details that get lost. A fan goes on whichever wall the cabling reached, ducting stops in a loft void, and the fan cuts out the moment the light does.

One rule is easy to miss. Where building work is done in a bathroom, any existing fan should be retained or replaced, and anything kept has to be checked to confirm it still works. Refits can often reach the tiling stage with the original fan left in place and nobody having tested it. 

All of it is cheap during the job and expensive to unpick afterwards, usually with a tenant in place. It also heads off one of the more tiresome disputes in lettings, over whether condensation is a building fault or a matter of how the tenant lives.

Water pressure is specified, not inherited

Water pressure comes second on the tenant list, and it’s the one most often treated as a fixed feature of the building, when in reality it isn’t. Seven metres static head, roughly 0.7 bar, is the minimum a supplier must provide, measured where their pipework meets yours. 

Most aim higher than this guaranteed figure, meaning seven metres is a floor rather than a working certainty, and the gap matters. Fitting a wide rainfall shower head in a property nobody has tested for flow is a decision made at the buying stage, and it surfaces later as a complaint no plumber can solve without changing the fitting. 

Checking first costs nothing. Take a bucket and a stopwatch, turn everything else off, and a kitchen tap should fill a four and a half litre bucket in 30 seconds.

Think twice before the bath comes out

The third place priority, a bathtub, cuts against a common instinct. The reflex during a refurbishment is to take the bath out and fit a larger shower, which frees up floor space and photographs well. In a one-bed flat aimed at professional sharers, that’s probably right, but in a family let, it can narrow the pool of interested tenants sharply.

The decision is worth working through rather than defaulting. Bathroom design firm Village Bathrooms has reviewed the bath versus shower question in more detail, and one figure from it is worth borrowing. A standard tub wants roughly 90cm by 75cm of clear floor alongside it, which is usually what the swap is really buying, and it’s hard to reverse once the room has been retiled around it.

The order decisions get made in

Making the right choices at the right time is what ties the three together. Extraction, water pressure and layout are all settled before anyone picks a tile, and once the pipework and first fix are done, changing your mind quickly gets more expensive. Bathroom designers treat that sequencing as the job itself, which is close to the reverse of how a lot of rental refurbishments happen.

The result of going against that sequence is easy to spot from the doorway. A door that catches on the basin before it fully opens, or a shower the mains was never going to feed sufficiently. Neither is a workmanship problem. Both are sequencing issues, and both stay put until the next refit.

What it means for the budget

A decent suite, good tiling and a well-chosen shower all earn their keep. They photograph well, help a property let faster and support a rent that reflects the standard of the place. Allison Thompson has set out which improvements justify a higher rent, making the point that upgrading the shower alone can be enough without a full refit.

That holds when the fundamentals underneath are sound. Put the first part of the budget into the hidden elements, and the visible upgrades sit on top of a bathroom that actually works. If your emphasis is purely on the visible parts, you will tend to pay twice.