The ‘‘needs washed’’ construction (e.g., ‘‘The car needs washed’’) is well attested as a minority morphosyntactic feature in British and American English varieties. It is believed to have arrived in the US due to Scots-Irish migration from the UK during the colonial period. However, the feature is largely unattested in other settler colonial varieties, despite Scots-Irish and Scottish people participating in early settlement. This poses a problem for the account of the feature in the US: why is it in the US, but not, say, Canada? This paper uses a grammatical acceptability survey to posit a resolution to the problem. I show that the "needs washed" construction is accepted by a sizable minority of Australians, Canadians, and New Zealanders, that acceptance corresponds with historical settlement patterns in Canada and New Zealand, and that constraints on acceptability in these three states mirror those in the US and UK. This suggests that the construction is present in all settler colonial varieties, supporting its proposed origin in the US. The findings suggest a pan-colonial scale of homogeneity in settler colonial varieties in which they share a set of minority features as a result of sharing similar groups of founding settlers.