Ceiling mounted showerheads, seamless glass panels and a tiled enclosure that runs wall to wall. It's easy to look at your bath and wonder whether it's still earning its place.
But before you hunt out the sledgehammer, it’s worth knowing what the research says.
For our Great British Bath Report 2026, we asked 250 estate agents and property valuers across the UK what removing a bath does to a home’s value. The findings might surprise you.
Does removing a bath devalue your home?
Nearly half of those we spoke to said they expected a home without a bath to lose between 3 and 4% of its value. On the average UK house price of £278,880*, that works out at just over £11,000.
Put simply, that’s a new kitchen, a loft conversion or a significant chunk off the next mortgage.
Imagine your home is for sale and you’re showing the potential new owners around. For a buyer who wants a bath, walking into your bathroom without one can change their whole approach to the viewing. Instead of imagining their life in the space, they're thinking about what it would cost to change it.
That shift shows up in the research figures too. For 45% of buyers, no bath isn't something they'd overlook or negotiate around with a lower offer. It's simply a reason not to proceed.
The cost you don't see on the valuation
The value figure is only part of the picture. Over a third of the agents we spoke to said a bath-free family home typically takes three to four weeks longer to sell.
A slow sale has a way of costing more than you’d expect. The uncertainty of waiting. The plans that can't quite move forward. The sense that life is on hold rather than moving on.
A bathroom decision made during a renovation could be the reason that the experience lasts longer than it needs to.
It's also worth thinking about what those extra weeks actually cost in practical terms. The mortgage doesn't pause while you wait for an offer. Neither do the bills, the insurance, or the estate agent fees that are quietly accumulating.
A longer sale rarely feels expensive in any single week, but by the time it's over, it usually is.
The bath you never use is still doing a job
After the kitchen, the bathroom is the room that often does the most work in a viewing. It’s where buyers form strong impressions quickly, and where expectations can run the highest.
What’s less obvious is that those expectations have very little to do with how you use the room. A bath that sits unused most of the week can still be the thing that makes a buyer feel at home during a ten-minute viewing.
More than a quarter of homeowners who never use their bath have chosen to keep it there for exactly that reason.
It’s also worth remembering that how we use our homes tends to change with us. The Sunday evening soak that doesn’t appeal right now might become the very part of the week you look forward to the most in a year or two.
Showers do win when it comes to speed and the Monday morning routine. The bath, with its unhurried twenty-minute fill doesn’t quite tick those boxes.
But the bath provides a mode of relaxation with bubbles and a good book. In fact, when we asked our own Instagram community in earlier research, 70% of those who responded told us they found a bath more relaxing than a shower.
The family bathroom
For family buyers especially, the case for keeping a bathtub goes beyond the numbers.
Bathing small children in a shower enclosure isn't really a matter of preference, it's genuinely impractical. Even when they’re older, more than a third of parents say it’s simply easier to get children to have a bath than a shower.
Property expert Liv Conlon, told us the bathroom is being looked at differently by today's homeowners.
“While walk-in showers have become the ‘quick and convenient’ choice, we’re seeing buyers lean back towards bathtubs as both a lifestyle and resale feature."
The average age of a first-time buyer is now 34. That’s an age when family life is either already underway or could be very much part of the plan. The bath that feels optional right now could feel essential within a couple of years.
The bath has changed
None of this has to mean settling for a bathroom you don’t love.
When we think of a bath, a long, fixed tub with a bulky surround often springs to mind. It dominates the room and leaves little space for anything else. But modern bathtubs have come a long way.
Freestanding designs have become one of the most sought-after features in a contemporary bathroom. Far from feeling dated, a well-chosen stand-alone bath is now the kind of focal point that stops people mid-viewing.
Compact baths work comfortably in rooms where a standard tub simply wouldn't. And if you haven't come across slim edge baths, they're worth a look.
A standard bath has a wide rolled rim that claims a good portion of the overall size. Slim edge baths strip that back, meaning less of the bath's overall size is taken up by the surround and more of it becomes usable bathing space.
Many have a neat, square edge at the tap end, which also makes them a practical choice if you're showering over the bath, giving you a more stable, even surface to step onto rather than a curved rim.
And a shower-over-bath setup means you're not choosing between the two at all. You get the practicality of a daily shower and the resale reassurance of a bath, without sacrificing the floor space you might have been worried about.
What’s right for your home
Keeping a bath and getting the bathroom you want don't have to work against each other. Freestanding baths, roll-top baths, corner options, and shower over baths mean there's usually a way to have both without compromising on either.
Whether you use your bath every day or hardly at all, enough buyers want the option that its absence can quietly shift the terms of a sale. And with more ways than ever to fit one into a bathroom you actually love, it’s a much easier decision to make than it used to be.
If you're thinking about your bathroom and want to explore what's possible, take a look at our baths range or browse our bathroom suites for layouts that work across all kinds of spaces.
