Weigh it before you hitch it
Most towing advice starts with a tow rating. That is the wrong number. Payload is the limit that actually binds on most half ton trucks and nearly every SUV, because a published tow rating assumes a driver and nothing else, while tongue weight is 10 to 15 percent of the trailer and pin weight is 15 to 25 percent. Add a family and a hitch and the payload sum fails long before the tow rating does.
16 calculators, 249 computed reference pages and 40 hardware spec sheets, all built on published standards with the rules of thumb labelled separately. Nothing here will tell you that a vehicle can tow a trailer, because that answer is on your door jamb and not on this site.
Conventional trailer
10 to 15%
Tongue weight as a share of loaded trailer weight. Err heavy, never light: too little tongue weight is what starts sway, and it feeds on itself.
Work it outFifth wheel
15 to 25%
Pin weight, far higher because it sits over the truck rear axle rather than behind it. All of it comes out of payload.
Work it outYour own sticker
Payload
On a yellow label in your driver door jamb. Passengers, gear, the hitch and the tongue weight all come out of this one figure.
Where to find itEvery calculator on this site asks for a weighed figure. A brochure dry weight and a guessed tongue weight will give you a confident answer that is wrong in the dangerous direction, and trailers routinely weigh well over a thousand pounds more loaded than the brochure said. These are the instruments that turn the guess into a measurement.
Ten sensors, enough for a dually tow vehicle and a triple axle trailer together, which is the only configuration where the cheaper kits genuinely run out.
Best for: A dually and a large fifth wheel monitored as one rig.
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Two gauges on one scale body, so a 400 lb tongue weight can be read on the 2,000 lb gauge where the resolution is useful rather than squinted at on the 5,000 lb one.
Best for: Somebody weighing both a light trailer and a heavy one.
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Reads in both pounds and kilograms on one gauge, at 5,000 lb capacity.
Best for: Pin weight, with a metric reading for anybody who wants it.
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Sherline is the scale the towing community actually uses, and a 1,000 lb capacity covers most travel trailers. Hydraulic, with no batteries to be dead when you need it.
Best for: A trailer whose tongue weight is under 1,000 lb.
Check price on AmazonA conventional travel trailer and a fifth wheel need almost entirely different hardware, so there are two ladders rather than one compromise. Every item priced and linked, with a real running total, what you can skip and what to upgrade first.
The 24,000 lb version at 5,400 lb of pin weight, which is the heaviest pin box in this catalog.
Best for: A large toy hauler behind a dually.
Check price on Amazon Coil spring cushioning rather than rubber, rated at 2,950 lb of pin weight and 18,000 lb of trailer. CURT publishes both numbers, which makes matching it to a weighed pin weight straightforward.
Best for: A trailer whose weighed pin weight is comfortably under 2,950 lb.
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The heavier rated version of the same torsion cushioning, for larger fifth wheels.
Best for: A large fifth wheel or toy hauler.
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Drops straight into the Ford factory puck system with no rails and no drilling, rated at 25,000 lb. If your truck came with the prep package, this is the cleanest install available.
Best for: A Ford Super Duty with the factory puck system.
Check price on Amazon249 pages computed from the same formulas the calculators use, so the figures cannot disagree. Every table is plain HTML you can quote, and every one says whether its numbers are a published standard, a rule of thumb, or something only your own vehicle can tell you.
Per-vehicle tow rating tables. We publish none, deliberately. A tow rating belongs to one exact configuration of engine, axle ratio, cab and drivetrain, not to a model name, so a table indexed by model name is wrong by construction for most of its rows. We give you the arithmetic instead, which is more useful anyway: a reader who works their own payload sum learns something a lookup table cannot teach them.
Commercial trucking. Cost per mile, IFTA fuel tax, hours of service, per diem and CDL topics are owner-operator calculations rather than RV ones, and we do not duplicate them. They live on our sister site: TruckingCalc.
A per-state trailer brake table. There is no single federal weight at which a light trailer needs brakes. It is state law and it genuinely varies, commonly somewhere between 1,500 and 5,000 lb. We could not source all fifty reliably, and a wrong row would be worse than no row, so we say it varies and tell you to check your own state and the trailer certification label.
Free download
Both ladders, conventional travel trailer and fifth wheel, at beginner, intermediate and expert budgets, every item priced and linked with a running total, plus a printable pre-trip weighing worksheet you can fill in at the scale.
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