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Rural communities in Fiji, like many countries in the Pacific region, use on-site sanitation systems which have been linked to faecal-oral diseases like typhoid fever. This study aimed to explore the safety of existing sanitation infrastructure and to estimate the proportion of safely managed systems (SDG 6.2 targets). This study was conducted in 29 rural communities along five catchments across three islands of Fiji. Two data collection events occurred: household level survey and observations from 311 households (including soil sampling from a subset of 99 latrine back-ends) and community-wide sanitation safety planning (SSP) covering 1502 households. Self-reported back-end category results from the sanitation surveys were found to be very different from the technical back-end observation findings. Specifically, there was high self-reporting of septic systems back-ends by the households in the survey (240/311 …