Bidet Map: Which Countries Use Bidets Around the World

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Here is a number that surprises most Americans: about 97% of homes in Italy have a bidet, and roughly 80% of households in Japan own an electronic version built into the toilet. In the United States, the figure is under 15%.

Bidet use is not a fringe habit. Across Southern Europe, East Asia, the Middle East, and most of South America, cleaning with water is simply how people use the bathroom. The countries that reach for toilet paper instead, the US, the UK, and much of Northern Europe, are the global minority. Below we map who uses bidets, by how much, and the surprisingly specific history that drew the line where it sits today.

If you are new to the fixture itself, start with our explainer on what a bidet is and then come back for the global picture.

How Many People Use Bidets Worldwide?

Our estimate: roughly 45% to 55% of the world's population cleans with water rather than toilet paper. That works out to somewhere around 4 billion people. No one publishes a global bidet census, so we built the figure ourselves by weighting each region's adoption rate against its population.

Add partial adoption in China, North America, and Northern Europe, where a minority of households wash, and the total lands close to 4 billion, or a little under half the planet.

A few things to keep in mind about that number:

• "Bidet" is doing a lot of work here. Most of those 4 billion people use a handheld sprayer or a lota water vessel, not a ceramic bidet or an electronic seat. If you count only standalone bidets and Washlet-style seats, the global figure drops to roughly 10% to 15% of people.
• The claim that "80% of the world uses bidets" is too high. It circulates widely online, but it only holds if you count every country with a water-cleaning tradition as 100% adopted and ignore China and most of Africa. Our region-by-region arithmetic does not get there.
• The direction of travel is up. The frontier markets, led by the US, are growing from a near-zero base. Our companion piece on the bidet market by country covers the size and growth rates behind those shifts.

The short version: washing with water is what most of the world does, and toilet paper as a primary method is concentrated in a handful of English-speaking and Northern European countries.

Bidet Map: Which Countries Use Bidets

Here is the world map of bidet use. Countries in dark green wash with water almost universally, teal means a bidet is common but not standard, yellow is partial and declining, and red means bidets are rare. Grey countries are ones we do not have a figure we would stand behind, so we have left them blank rather than guess.

The single clearest read on this map is the bidet versus toilet paper divide. Paper-first countries are a small, tightly clustered group: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Australia and New Zealand. Everywhere shaded green or teal, which is most of the world's population, water is the default.

Notice also that the green band is not one culture. It is three separate traditions that happened to arrive at the same answer: the Mediterranean ceramic bidet running from Italy across to South America, the Japanese and Korean electronic seat, and the handheld sprayer used across the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.

Countries Where Bidets Are Common: The Numbers

We compiled the figures below from World Population Review's country rankings, Japanese consumer-durables surveys, EU market data, and historical adoption sources. Treat them as well-supported estimates rather than census-grade precision. National bidet statistics are patchy, and different sources count standalone bidets, handheld sprayers, and electronic seats differently.

A few patterns jump out. Water-based cleaning dominates wherever one of three forces took hold: a Mediterranean bidet tradition, an East Asian embrace of bathroom technology, or a religious norm around washing. The holdouts are mostly English-speaking and Northern European countries where toilet paper became entrenched first and never lost its grip.

Which Countries Use Bidets the Most?

Ranked by household ownership of a bidet fixture or seat, the leaders are:

1. Italy, roughly 97%. Legally required in every new home since 1975. No country is close.
2. Middle East and South Asia, roughly 85% to 100%. Near-universal water cleaning, though almost always via a handheld sprayer or lota rather than a ceramic bidet.
3. Japan, roughly 80%. The highest electronic-seat ownership anywhere.
4. Argentina and Venezuela, roughly 80% to 90%. Mediterranean-style fixtures carried over by Italian and Spanish immigration.
5. Portugal, Spain, and Greece, roughly 50% to 90%. Long-standing standalone bidet tradition, with Portugal at the top of that range.
6. South Korea, roughly 60%. Followed Japan into electronic seats.
7. Brazil, roughly 60% to 70%. A mix of standalone bidets and sprayers.

If the measure is "people who clean with water" rather than "people who own a bidet fixture," the ranking reshuffles and South Asia and the Middle East move to the top outright, because sprayers and lotas are far more widespread than fixtures.

Countries With Bidets vs Countries Without

The short list of countries where a bidet is genuinely uncommon is easier to memorize than the list where it is normal:

• Rare, under 15% of homes: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Australia, New Zealand.
• Common to near-universal: Italy, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, and effectively every country across the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, plus Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay.

That is the whole divide. Roughly a dozen wealthy, mostly English-speaking or Northern European countries wipe, and most of the rest of the world washes.

Italy: The Bidet Capital of the World

No country comes close to Italy. At roughly 97% household ownership, the bidet is as standard in an Italian bathroom as the sink.

The reason is not only cultural, it is legal. Since 1975, Italian building code has required a bidet in every newly constructed home. That single regulation turned a popular fixture into a near-universal one. Ask many Italians about a bathroom without a bidet and you will get a look of genuine confusion; to them it is like a kitchen without a sink.

Italy's bidet is the classic standalone basin: a separate porcelain fixture next to the toilet that you straddle after going. It is a different model from the seat-integrated approach Japan made famous, but it achieves the same result.

Japan: Where the Bidet Became a Gadget

Japan tells the other great bidet story, and it is a story about technology rather than tradition. About 80% of Japanese homes have an electronic bidet seat, the type most people know by Toto's brand name, Washlet.

Japan had little standalone-bidet history before the modern era. What changed everything was Toto's launch of the Washlet in 1980, an electric seat with a retractable warm-water nozzle, a heated seat, adjustable pressure, and an air dryer. It fit Japan's small bathrooms (no second fixture required) and its appetite for clever household technology. Within a few decades it went from novelty to default.

This is why "do they use bidets in Japan" has a slightly different answer than "do they use bidets in Italy." Italy uses a fixture. Japan uses a feature built into the toilet. If you want that same experience at home, our roundup of the best bidet seats covers the Washlet-style units that brought the Japanese standard to the US market.

The Middle East, South Asia, and the Religious Roots of Washing

Some of the highest water-cleaning rates on earth are not in Italy or Japan at all. Across the Middle East, South Asia, and much of Southeast Asia, washing with water is close to universal, with usage in many countries reaching 90% to 100%.

The instrument is usually not a standalone bidet but a handheld sprayer, often called a shattaf, or a simple water vessel known as a lota. The practice is rooted in religious and cultural cleanliness norms, particularly in Muslim-majority countries where washing after using the toilet is an expectation rather than a preference.

The takeaway for the global map: if you measure "people who clean with water" rather than "people who own a ceramic bidet," the practice covers a clear majority of the world's population. Toilet paper, not the bidet, is the regional oddity.

South America: How Bidets Crossed the Atlantic

South America is one of the strongest bidet regions outside Europe, and the reason is migration. Waves of Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese immigrants carried the standalone bidet to the New World, where it took root.

In Argentina and Venezuela, household ownership runs an estimated 80% to 90%, putting them in the same tier as Mediterranean Europe. Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay are close behind. In much of the region, a bidet is simply part of a normal bathroom, no more remarkable than a towel rack.

Europe Is Split Down the Middle

Europe is not one bidet story but two. The Mediterranean south, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Greece, and historically France, embraced the standalone bidet centuries ago. France is actually the birthplace of the fixture, with the first bidets appearing in upper-class French homes in the early 1700s. Ironically, French adoption has slipped over the decades and now sits closer to 40% to 50% as new apartments leave the bidet out.

The north and west, including the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia, never built the habit. The UK in particular has near-zero ownership and a long history of treating the bidet as a foreign curiosity. The line between washing Europe and wiping Europe runs roughly along the same cultural seam that separates Mediterranean and Northern lifestyles in plenty of other areas, from diet to daily routine.

Why Don't Americans Use Bidets?

If most of the world washes, why does the US, along with the UK and Canada, still mostly wipe? The answer is a stack of historical accidents rather than any single cause.

Bathrooms were built for paper. The US adopted indoor plumbing relatively late and standardized bathroom layouts around the toilet, sink, and tub. American bathrooms were also smaller than the spacious European rooms that could fit a second basin, so there was literally no room for a bidet.

A wartime image problem. Many American soldiers in World War II first encountered bidets in European brothels. The fixture picked up an association with immorality, and returning veterans were in no hurry to advocate for something they had seen in a bordello. Early on, bidets were also linked, inaccurately, with contraception.

Toilet paper got there first. In the early 1900s, companies like Scott Paper marketed toilet tissue aggressively as the modern, hygienic, all-American solution. By the time bidets might have caught on, paper was already the cultural default, and defaults are hard to dislodge.

Habit, plain and simple. Most Americans learned to use the bathroom with toilet paper because their parents did, and theirs before them. Unfamiliarity, not any real drawback, keeps the cycle going.

The encouraging part: this is changing fast. Household penetration is still under 15%, but the share of Americans who say they have used a bidet jumped from roughly 26% to 37% in a single year. Cheap attachments that clamp onto an existing toilet, the 2020 toilet paper shortage, and growing awareness of the hygiene and cost savings have all pushed adoption up. The US is early on the curve, not stuck off it.

What the Global Map Tells You

Step back and the pattern is clear. Cleaning with water is what roughly half the planet does, expressed three different ways: the Mediterranean standalone basin, the Japanese electronic seat, and the Middle Eastern and South Asian handheld sprayer. Toilet paper as a primary cleaning method is concentrated in a handful of English-speaking and Northern European countries.

Those adoption rates also shape the business. Saturated markets like Italy and the Middle East grow only through replacement, while low-penetration countries like the US supply nearly all the category's growth. We break that down in our companion article on the bidet market by country.

For an American or Brit, that reframes the question. The interesting puzzle is not "why does the rest of the world use bidets" but "why did a few countries stop." And once you have tried one, the appeal that drove 97% of Italy and 80% of Japan tends to make a lot more sense.

If you want to join the majority, the easiest on-ramp is a clamp-on attachment or an electric seat for your existing toilet. Our guide to the best bidet seats walks through the options, from $40 attachments to full Washlet-style units, so you can find the version that fits your bathroom and budget.