Start with the household, not the market
The decision gets framed as a resale question, which is why so many people get it wrong. Resale matters, but it is the second question.
The first is honest use. How many times has the bath in this room been run in the last two years? For a large share of households the answer is somewhere between zero and four, and the bath is occupying roughly a third of the floor in the room they use twice a day.
If the answer is "we use it weekly", keep it. If the answer is "the kids used to", the room is being designed for a household that no longer exists.
When to keep the bath regardless
It is the only bath in the house and your buyer pool has small children. Across the family-heavy North Shore suburbs — St Ives, Roseville, Lindfield, Killara, Willoughby — a house with no bath anywhere genuinely narrows the market. Buyers with a toddler treat it as a requirement, not a nice-to-have.
You have small children now. Practical, not theoretical.
The room is big enough for both, properly. In a bathroom over about seven square metres, a freestanding bath and a separate walk-in shower is the layout most people actually want. It is only in small rooms that this becomes an either/or.
When to remove it
There is a second bathroom that keeps a bath. The most common good case. The main bathroom becomes the room you actually use, and the house still satisfies a buyer who wants a tub somewhere.
The room is under five square metres. The bath is consuming a third of the floor to serve a function you rarely use. The walk-in shower will make the room feel and work like a different space.
It is a shower-over-bath. This is the compromise that is worse than either option. Stepping over a bath wall into a shower is awkward and gets less appealing every year. It is hard to clean, it usually comes with a curtain or a folding screen, and it dates a room more reliably than any tile choice.
It is an ensuite. Almost nobody wants a bath in an ensuite. The floor is better spent on the shower and on somewhere to stand.
The cost question, honestly
People assume removing the bath saves real money. It saves a little.
You avoid buying the bath and the labour to set and seal it. Against that, a good walk-in shower usually needs a larger waterproofed zone, more careful falls across a wider floor area, and a decent glass panel — and frameless glass is not cheap.
Treat the two as broadly comparable and make the decision on function. If someone is pushing you toward one on cost grounds, the difference is unlikely to be what is motivating them.
Where cost genuinely changes is if the waste has to move. Converting a bath position into a shower usually reuses the existing waste, which is why it is such a good-value change. Putting the shower somewhere entirely new means new falls — cheap enough on the suspended timber floors in the interwar housing, expensive on the concrete slabs common in Chatswood and North Sydney apartments. The cost page sets out the bands.
If you go walk-in, get these right
Size. 900 x 900mm is the practical minimum. 1200 x 900mm is comfortable. From about 1600mm long with a single fixed panel it starts to feel genuinely open.
Entry position. Put the entry away from the rose so you are not walking through the spray to reach the controls. This sounds obvious and is regularly got wrong.
The falls. More open shower means more floor draining to the waste. This is where a competent tiler earns the money — and the test after the job is a bucket of water on the floor. If it all reaches the waste, it is right.
Splash management. A single fixed panel handles most of it. Fully open works only when the room is long enough to put real distance between the rose and everything else.
A niche. Somewhere for the bottles that is not a corner caddy. Planned at rough-in, between studs, waterproofed so water cannot pool in the base.
If you keep the bath
Freestanding looks better and cleans worse. You need clearance around it — about 100mm minimum to any wall, more to be practical — and the floor underneath still needs cleaning.
Back-to-wall freestanding is the sensible compromise in most rooms: the sculptural look, no gap behind to trap water and dust.
Built-in with a tiled surround is the most space-efficient and gives you a shelf, which in a small bathroom is worth more than the aesthetic.
Check the joists. A full bath of water plus an occupant is a significant load. On a suspended timber floor, particularly in an older house, that is worth confirming before you buy something heavy.
The compromise worth considering
If the room is genuinely too small for both but a bath matters to you, the answer is often not in this room at all. Put a bath in the second bathroom, or the laundry-adjacent space if the plan allows, and make the main bathroom a proper walk-in shower.
Two rooms that each do one thing well beats one room that does both badly.
The accessibility case nobody raises early enough
There is a version of this decision that has nothing to do with resale or aesthetics, and it deserves more airtime than it gets.
Stepping over a bath wall gets harder with age, and a shower-over-bath is one of the more common places people are injured at home. If anyone in the household is likely to still be in this house in fifteen or twenty years, a level-entry walk-in shower is not a compromise — it is the better long-term room.
Designing for that does not mean an institutional-looking bathroom. It means a continuous floor with no hob, falls set out properly, a fixed glass panel instead of a swinging door, and blocking in the wall at rough-in so a grab rail can be added later if it is ever wanted. The blocking costs almost nothing while the wall is open and is expensive to retrofit into finished tiling.
None of it is visible in the completed room. All of it means the bathroom still works when circumstances change, which is worth considerably more than the twenty minutes it adds to the planning conversation.
Where to go next
Small bathroom layouts covers how the decision interacts with the rest of the room, and does a renovation add value covers the resale side properly.
For an opinion on your room, call 02 4602 1201 or send the dimensions through.
More from Bathroom Advice
- Asbestos in old bathrooms: what owners need to knowWhy pre-1990 North Shore bathrooms often hide asbestos sheeting, how it is identified, who is licensed to remove it, and what it does to your program.
- Cost per square metre, and why the figure misleadsWhy per-square-metre pricing misleads on bathrooms, what the 2026 Sydney figures actually are, and the better way to sanity-check a renovation quote.
- Does a bathroom renovation add value before you sell?Whether a bathroom renovation pays back at sale on Sydney's North Shore, when it does not, and the cheaper alternative most sellers should consider first.
- Renovating a bathroom in a heritage conservation areaWhat heritage listing and conservation area controls mean for an internal bathroom renovation in Ku-ring-gai, Willoughby and Mosman — and what they do not.
Frequently asked questions
Does removing the only bath hurt resale?
It can, and it depends on your buyer pool. In family-heavy North Shore suburbs a house with no bath anywhere narrows the market, because buyers with small children treat a bath as a requirement rather than a preference. Where a second bathroom keeps one, removing the main bath is generally safe.
Is a walk-in shower cheaper than keeping a bath?
Usually slightly, and the saving is smaller than people expect. You avoid buying a bath and the labour to set it, but a good walk-in shower needs careful falls, a decent screen and sometimes a wider waterproofed zone. Treat them as broadly comparable and decide on function, not cost.
Can I have both in a small bathroom?
Under about five square metres, rarely well. A shower-over-bath is the traditional compromise and it is genuinely worse than either option on its own — awkward to step into, hard to clean, and it dates a room instantly. If both matter, the better answer is usually a bath in one room and a shower in another.
What size walk-in shower is comfortable?
About 900 x 900mm is the practical minimum, 1200 x 900mm is comfortable, and anything from 1600mm long with a single fixed panel starts to feel generous. Length matters more than width for the walk-in feel, because it is what lets you place the entry away from the spray.
Do I need a shower screen at all?
Not necessarily, but you need something managing the splash — usually a fixed glass panel. Fully open showers work when the room is long enough to put distance between the rose and the rest of the room, and when the falls are set out properly. In a small room, skipping the panel means a wet floor.