About Tow Ratings | Tow Ratings

Why this site exists

Towing capacity is one of those numbers that matters a lot at exactly two moments — when you buy a vehicle, and when you buy a trailer — and is almost impossible to find anywhere obvious in between. Manufacturers publish a fresh towing guide every model year, but those guides live behind login walls on dealer portals, get reorganised every product refresh, and disappear from the web entirely once a model goes out of production.

The result is that an owner of a 2008 Ford Explorer trying to work out whether their truck can pull a 5,000 lb camper has to dig through forum threads and dealership PDFs to find a number that the manufacturer published clearly twenty years ago. That's the gap this site fills. Every year, every make, every model, every trim — one consistent reference page that loads in under a second.

What's in the dataset

Maximum towing capacity per trim, in pounds, across every hitch class the manufacturer publishes.
Gross Vehicle Weight Rating (GVWR), the maximum total weight of vehicle plus passengers plus cargo plus tongue weight.
Curb weight, the weight of the vehicle as it sits in the dealer lot, with full fluids and no occupants.
Payload capacity, the difference between GVWR and curb weight — what you can put inside the vehicle (passengers, cargo, tongue weight) without exceeding the rating.
Engine, drivetrain, horsepower, torque, axle ratio, and wheelbase for the trim that delivers each headline tow rating.

How to use the site

Pick a year, make, and model from the dropdowns on the home page to jump straight to the trim breakdown for your specific vehicle. Or browse by manufacturer to see every model that maker has published towing data for, organised year by year. The comparison pages let you put two vehicles side by side, and the towing calculator works out whether your specific tow vehicle plus trailer combination is within the manufacturer's published limits.

Where the data comes from

Every figure on the site is derived from manufacturer documentation — the per-model towing guides OEMs publish each model year, plus window-sticker specs, sales literature, and owner's manuals for older vehicles where the current manufacturer site no longer carries the original page. Our methodology page walks through the full sourcing and verification process, including how to file a correction.

Who runs Tow Ratings

Tow Ratings is an independent reference site. It is not a dealership, a manufacturer, an insurance broker, or a finance company. The site does not run affiliate links, lead-capture forms, or "find a dealer near you" widgets. It exists because the data should be easy to look up, and because the alternative — a Google search that lands you on three auto-blog SEO traps before you find the actual number — is a bad experience for anyone trying to make a real towing decision.

Contact

Spot a wrong number, a missing model, or a page that ought to exist but doesn't? Email hello@towratings.net with the year, make, and model — corrections get reviewed and republished with a published reason in the dataset.