If You Rent

In a rented home the toilet is part of the property, and repairing it is normally the landlord’s responsibility rather than yours. The exact duty comes from your tenancy agreement and from the habitability rules in your state, which differ, so the document to check first is your own lease.

We are a referral service for homeowners and we are not able to tell you what your agreement says. What we can say is that arranging and paying for a contractor yourself is rarely the right first move, and can leave you out of pocket with no way to recover it.

Put it in writing even if you have already said it out loud, because the written report is what establishes when the landlord knew. Describe what it is doing rather than what you think it is: runs constantly, water on the floor after flushing, moves when sat on. Those three are different faults with different urgency, and a report that says “the toilet is broken” does not distinguish them.

Water appearing at the base after a flush is going under the fixture and into the floor. That is a seal failure, it damages the building rather than inconveniencing you, and it is worth saying so plainly when you report it.

A toilet that is running is not an emergency, but if you are on a metered supply it is money leaving somewhere, and EPA puts the average household’s leaks at more than 9,300 gallons a year.

Source: US EPA WaterSense, Fix a Leak Week.

Turn the shut-off valve behind the toilet clockwise until it stops and do not flush again. That is the one thing worth doing yourself in any tenancy, because it prevents damage rather than repairing anything.

Then the fault list is the same and the decision is yours: start with running, a weak flush, a leak at the base or nothing happening at all, and whether it is worth repairing once you know which one it is.