The Best Travel Trailer Tires

Trailer tires are the single most common way a trip ends badly, and almost all of it is preventable with three habits: correct load rating, correct pressure, and replacing them on age rather than tread.

Start with the placard, not the tire

Your trailer has a placard, usually on the front left exterior wall or inside a cabinet, giving the tire size, load range and cold inflation pressure it was built for. That is the specification.

The tire currently on the trailer may not match it. Previous owners substitute what was cheap or available, and a load range C tire on a trailer specified for D is a trailer running closer to its limit than the manufacturer intended on every trip.

Load range: a letter indicating the tire’s strength and maximum inflation. C is 6-ply rated, D is 8-ply rated, E is 10. Higher letters carry more weight at higher pressure. Never fit lower than the placard specifies.

The arithmetic you should do once

Four tires on a tandem axle, each rated 2,149 lb, is 8,596 lb of capacity. Your trailer’s GVWR — on its own placard — is the most it is allowed to weigh, and tongue weight is carried by the truck rather than by the tires.

So the tires carry roughly the GVWR minus the tongue weight. For a 7,000 lb GVWR trailer with 840 lb on the tongue, that is about 6,160 lb across four tires — around 1,540 lb each, comfortably inside a 2,149 lb rating.

Do that arithmetic once with your own numbers. If it comes out close to the tire rating, you want a higher load range, because trailer tires do not like running near their limit in summer heat.

ST or LT

An ST tire is built for a trailer: stiff sidewalls to resist the lateral loads a trailer axle generates, high inflation pressure, and generally a lower speed rating. An LT tire is a light truck tire built to steer and put power down, which a trailer tire never has to do.

This is one of the more argued-about questions in towing. The short version: ST is what your placard specifies, and there needs to be a real reason to deviate. Some owners move to LT for higher speed ratings or better availability, and if you do, the load capacity at your actual inflation pressure has to be at least what the ST tire provided. The two compared properly.

The date code, which matters more than the tread

Travel trailers cover few miles and spend most of their life parked in sunlight. The failure mode is not tread wear — it is the sidewall degrading from UV and ozone while the tread still looks nearly new.

Find the DOT code on the sidewall. The last four digits are the week and year of manufacture: “2225” is the 22nd week of 2025. The widely used replacement window is three to five years from that date regardless of appearance.

Two consequences. Check the date code on tires you are buying, not just on the ones you are replacing — a tire that has sat in a warehouse for two years has used two years of its life. And cover the tires when the trailer is parked for weeks, because that is cheap and it directly addresses the actual failure mechanism. The full aging story.

Pressure: run them at the maximum

Unlike car tires, ST tires are generally specified at the maximum cold pressure on the sidewall — often 50–80 psi. The stiff sidewall needs that pressure to carry its rated load, and running them soft is how you build heat.

Measure cold, before driving, with a gauge that actually reads that high. Most car gauges top out around 50–60 psi, which makes them useless here. The pressure guide.

The verdict

Buy the Carlisle in load range D if your placard calls for D and you want something widely stocked — availability matters when you need one replacement in two years. Buy the Maxxis if you tow long distances in heat and want the tire with the strongest owner reputation, checking the load range against your placard. The budget load range D option is the right rating at a lower price with much less published history behind it.

And buy a TPMS. A trailer tire going down is invisible from the driver’s seat until it comes apart. TPMS picks.