Iceland Campervans With a Toilet and Shower: Every Model You Can Actually Rent

Two things in that table are worth pausing on. The first is that the split is not budget versus premium. CampEasy's fleet includes vehicles that cost more per day than several of the motorhomes further down the list, and not one of them has a shower — you are buying a newer, better-equipped van, not a bathroom. If a bathroom is the thing you want, paying more at a bathroom-free company gets you nowhere near it.

The second is that a bathroom does not have to mean a motorhome. Indie's Active line is sold as campervans and carries a toilet, sink and shower right down to the two-berth; McRent's smallest class is a panel van with a wet room in it; Camper Rental Iceland's smallest motorhome is a two-berth van. If you want the shortest vehicle you can get a bathroom in, that is where the search starts — and if you would rather rule the question out and travel light, the companies that build their vans without one are not compromising, they are building a different vehicle.

The phrase that matters in that table is "the basin tap doubles as the showerhead". That is the standard compact-van bathroom, and it is worth understanding before you pay for it: the whole cubicle is the shower tray. You fold the basin out of the way or swing a wall across, pull the tap off its mount, and wash standing over the toilet. Afterwards, everything in the room is wet, including the toilet paper if you left it in there. It works. It is not the walk-in cubicle in the brochure photograph.

The other thing these vans share is that 190 cm ceiling. That is genuine standing height for most adults, and it is why a panel-van conversion can carry a bathroom at all while a Transporter or Doblo conversion cannot — the tall-roof van is a different vehicle class, roughly 2.6 m to the top, which changes how it behaves in Icelandic crosswinds. If you have not read what wind does to a high-sided camper here, do that before you commit to the tallest thing on the lot.

None of these is a 4x4. That is not an oversight in our list: the conversions that carry bathrooms are front-wheel-drive panel vans, so the moment you need F-roads and the highlands, you are back to a bathroom-free 4x4 with a portable toilet in the boot. There is no vehicle in this market that gives you both.

The honest summary of this table is that you are not really buying a bathroom, you are buying a category. A coachbuilt is a heavier, taller, slower vehicle than the van you were probably comparing it against; it is harder to place on a campsite pitch, much harder in a Reykjavík car park, and considerably less pleasant in a crosswind. It also opens up things a van cannot do — a lounge that four people can eat in when the weather has closed the day down, and enough insulation and heating to make that comfortable.

Two things deserve a second look for the opposite reason. McRent's Compact Plus is 595 cm — genuinely shorter than several bathroom-free campervans on the same search page — and it is a full coachbuilt with a fixed washroom. And their two-berth Urban Plus is the only vehicle in their Iceland range you can book through midwinter at all. If the phrase "moving up to a motorhome" is putting you off, the full McRent catalogue is worth ten minutes: the range starts a lot smaller than the category's reputation suggests.

The one thing to be careful about with McRent specifically is that you are not booking a vehicle. Their Iceland terms bind the reservation to a vehicle group, not a model, and their own search shows more cards than they have products — several of which are the same motorhome photographed as a different van. The washroom is common to every group, so the bathroom question is safe; the length, the payload and the layout are not.

Both pairs show the same split, and it is the one that matters. Where the shower has its own cubicle, you close a door on the wet part and walk away. Where it does not — the wet room — you shower, then squeegee or towel the whole compartment before anyone can use the toilet dry, and you learn quickly not to leave the paper in there. Three minutes a day and a towel, which over a fortnight is the difference between a feature you use every morning and one you use twice before giving up in favour of the campsite block.

Neither type is generous with water. Every one of these vehicles draws on a single tank of 85 to 122 litres that also feeds the kitchen, and the boiler heats a fraction of it at a time. Two adults showering properly will clear a tank in two to three days, which is the real reason experienced renters treat an on-board shower as a convenience for the mornings you cannot face the campsite block rather than a replacement for it.

Where you empty them is the part travellers most often arrive without having thought about. Iceland's disposal points sit at campsites, at some N1 stations and at dedicated stops; the Environment Agency of Iceland publishes the official list, and emptying a tank anywhere else — a lay-by, a stream, a campsite drain that is not the designated one — is prohibited outright, not merely frowned upon. A motorhome's whole water system therefore ties your route to that map in a way a bathroom-free van never does.

The good news is that the map and your route already overlap, because the law puts you at a campsite most nights anyway. The complication is seasonal: in winter a large share of campsites close, and the ones that stay open do not all keep their service points running. That is the same constraint that decides where you can fill up with fresh water, so it cuts both ways at once.

This is not one company being awkward. Every water system on a camper is a set of thin pipes running through unheated voids, and Iceland spends five months around freezing. Vehicles with a fuel-fired or gas heater that runs while parked can generally keep the plumbing alive; the ones relying on a campsite hookup cannot, because the heat stops when you unplug. If the heating question is new to you, it is the same question as the plumbing question, asked earlier in the sentence.

The second catch is weight, and it catches motorhome renters specifically. Water weighs a kilo a litre, so a full 100-litre fresh tank is 100 kg of your payload before anyone's luggage goes in. That is why manufacturers rate these vehicles with only 20 litres on board — the published payload assumes you are driving nearly dry and filling up at the campsite. On the McRent groups we have measured, the payload published for individual vehicles inside a single group ranged from 179 kg to 586 kg, and you do not get to pick which one arrives. On the low end of that range, a full tank of water is more than half of everything you are allowed to carry.

CampEasy are unusually candid about when this is worth it, and their advice matches what experienced renters say: they recommend it for long highland excursions where facilities are thin and for winter camping, and note that "the toilet takes up space and isn't necessary for summer and lowland trips". Their own staff, they say, take one only for extended trips into the interior and occasionally mid-winter. That is a rental company talking you out of a paid extra, which is worth listening to.

The arithmetic is straightforward for a short trip and less so for a long one. A per-day portable toilet is cheap over a week and stops being cheap over three; a flat per-rental charge behaves the opposite way. Either way it is a fraction of the difference between a van and a motorhome, which is the comparison that actually matters — and unlike a fixed bathroom, it comes with no water system to freeze, no tank to drive around with, and no restriction to front-wheel-drive vehicles, so it is the only way to have a toilet on an F-road trip into the highlands.

Two practical notes. You still empty it at the same disposal points as a cassette, so the route planning does not change. And it lives in the cabin, which is a real cost in a small van — in a two-berth conversion it will occupy the footwell you were using for a bag.

The pattern those bands show has been consistent for as long as we have been collecting: a fleet where every vehicle has a washroom sits well above the market's typical camper, and the gap is a large fraction of the base rate rather than a small premium on top of it. You are paying for a larger, heavier, better-insulated vehicle and the bathroom arrives with it — which is exactly why the cheap route to a toilet is a rented portable one in a van you would have booked anyway.

It is also why the middle band is the interesting one. Plenty of four-berth campervans have no plumbing at all, so a family-sized camper is not automatically a bathroom camper; sorting by size and hoping is the most common way people end up disappointed at the counter. Filter for the models named in the tables above instead, and check what today's rates look like across the whole market before you decide the bathroom is the thing worth paying for.

One cost that is not in these bands: the alternative. A campsite shower is typically 400–1,000 ISK, often coin- or token-operated on a five-minute timer, and a swimming pool is roughly 1,000–1,500 ISK with unlimited hot water, a hot tub and a sauna attached. Two people showering at the pool every day for a fortnight comes to a small fraction of the step up to a motorhome, which is the calculation most Iceland regulars have quietly already done.