Despite the growing demand for continental to global perspectives on coastal flooding, broad-scale inundation modeling remains restricted by computational resources and data availability. While fast and practical, the simple static approach to inundate cells below a water level – much like a “bathtub” – has shown to lack accuracy compared to more complex dynamic models. Various improvements to the bathtub method have been proposed but are yet to be assessed at broad scales. We compare three static inundation models with increasingly complexity in representing the attenuation of flood propagation. Using results from a pan-European 2D modeling effort as a benchmark, this study finds that a non-linear attenuation of water levels can help improve the representation of both flood depth and extent with negligeable computational cost. We also find that in “narrow” coastal floodplains, a bathtub model can yield similar results to dynamically generated flood maps, emphasizing the need to carefully consider floodplain characteristics when choosing an inundation modeling method.