Weigh Before You Wander
Here we are, just a few days away from going full-time, and we’re starting to fill the rig with everything we’ll need to live and work on the road. And when I say everything, it turns out all that stuff gets heavy—fast. Weight has always been in the back of our minds because overloading an RV can cause serious problems on the road, affect handling and braking, put additional stress on the tires and suspension, and generally make a very large vehicle less pleasant, and potentially less safe, to drive. So, before loading the last of our belongings, we decided it was time to find out exactly what our RV weighed.
First, Know Your Limits
Next to the driver’s seat is a sticker outlining the RV’s weight ratings. For our 2025 Winnebago Vista NPF 29NP, these are the numbers we’re working with:
Rating / Maximum
GVWR — entire motorhome - 18,000 lb
Front GAWR - 7,000 lb
Rear GAWR - 12,000 lb
GCWR — motorhome + towed vehicle/trailer - 23,000 lb
Trailer hitch rating - 5,000 lb
Max hitch tongue weight - 500 lb
There’s something interesting here. The front axle can carry up to 7,000 pounds and the rear can carry up to 12,000 pounds. Add those together and you get 19,000 pounds, but our GVWR is only 18,000. That means we can’t simply max out both axles. If we somehow had exactly 7,000 pounds on the front axle, for example, we could only have 11,000 pounds on the rear before reaching our 18,000-pound GVWR. The important takeaway is that we have to stay below both the individual axle limits and the total GVWR. Simple enough. Now we just needed to find out what ours actually weighed.
Time to Hit the Scale
The closest scale we found was a CAT Scale in North Bend, Washington. One really nice thing about CAT Scale is their app. When you pull onto the scale, you can handle the weigh-in through your phone, pay in the app, and have your weights recorded without having to wander around trying to figure out what you’re supposed to do. Our weigh-in cost only about $15, which seemed pretty cheap for something that could potentially save us from a much more expensive problem later.
So we pulled onto the scale, with the front tires on the first pad and the rear tires on the second. There’s also a third pad for trailers or other configurations. A few seconds later, our results popped up in the app, and… WE WERE OVERWEIGHT.
Rating / Actual Weight
Entire motorhome - 18,230 lb
Front axle - 6,000 lb
Rear axle - 12,230 lb
Well, crap. Not only were we 230 pounds over our 18,000-pound GVWR, our rear axle was also 230 pounds over its 12,000-pound limit. Meanwhile, the front axle had an entire 1,000 pounds of unused capacity. That told us two things: we needed to lose weight, and we needed to pay much more attention to where that weight was sitting.
Operation: Lose Some Pounds
After a brief moment of panic, my wife and I started reassessing everything inside the RV and down in the storage compartments. What could go? What could be moved? And what did we really need inside the RV while traveling? Luckily, we already had something of a backup plan: our Subaru Forester. We’ve always planned to drive the Subaru alongside the RV rather than tow it. Our travel days generally aren’t going to be particularly long, and for us, having a second driver and vehicle makes more sense than towing. Now the Subaru has another job: life raft. Or, more accurately, our auxiliary storage compartment. Heavy things that don’t need to be inside the RV while we’re driving can go in the Subaru—the Blackstone, larger kitchen appliances, toolbox, extra clothes, books, wine, and whatever other odds and ends we convince ourselves are absolutely essential to life on the road.
And then we discovered one very large culprit: water.
We still had about 85% of our fresh-water tank full. Our fresh-water tank holds 71 gallons, and water weighs about 8.34 pounds per gallon, so a completely full tank weighs roughly 592 pounds. At 85% full, we were carrying approximately 503 pounds of fresh water, and on our coach, that water is contributing significant weight toward the rear—the exact axle we were already overloading. That’s a lot of weight to carry around when we don’t actually need a full tank most of the time. Our plan is generally not to travel with large amounts of fresh water unless we know we’ll need it. Obviously, we’ll carry water when our destination or travel plans require it, but there’s little reason for us to haul hundreds of extra pounds around unnecessarily. Gray and black water matter too, since anything that goes into those tanks adds weight, so tank levels are now something we’ll be paying much more attention to before travel days.
Then There Was the Mattress…
Once we’d dealt with the obvious stuff, we started looking for heavy items that couldn’t simply be tossed into the Subaru, and one thing stood out: our mattress. Like many RV owners, replacing the factory mattress was one of our first upgrades. We bought a lovely Brooklyn Bedding Short King that felt like sleeping on a cloud. There was just one problem: that cloud weighed almost 90 pounds. And all of that weight was sitting toward the rear of an RV whose rear axle was already over its limit.
So we did something I never expected to do: we bought ANOTHER mattress. The heavier mattress went into storage, where we’ll hopefully use it again someday in a future RV with more carrying capacity. In the meantime, we’re trying a much lighter option that will hopefully be equally comfortable—or at least comfortable enough that we don’t wake up regretting this entire decision.
Such is RV life.
So, What Did We Learn?
Knowing your RV’s weight limits is important for anyone traveling in an RV, but I think it’s especially important for those of us planning to live full-time in one. When your RV becomes your house, there’s a very natural temptation to bring your entire house with you. Unfortunately, your house has a GVWR.
1. Know your numbers.
Find the weight-rating sticker in your RV and understand what those numbers mean. GVWR (Gross Vehicle Weight Rating) is the maximum allowable weight of the fully loaded RV, while GAWR (Gross Axle Weight Rating) is the maximum allowable weight that can be carried by a particular axle. Staying under your GVWR isn’t enough if you’ve overloaded one axle; you have to pay attention to both. Why does it matter? An overloaded RV can take longer to stop, handle poorly during emergency maneuvers or crosswinds, put additional stress on tires and suspension components, and increase stress on the drivetrain and brakes, especially when climbing or descending long grades.
2. Weigh your RV before you fill it with your entire life.
If possible, establish a baseline weight before loading all your personal belongings. Know what’s aboard when you weigh it—people, fuel, propane, fresh water, gray water, black water, aftermarket accessories, tools, and everything else. Then weigh it again once you’re loaded for travel. The more accurately you know your starting point, the easier it is to understand how much capacity you actually have left.
3. Water adds up REALLY quickly.
At roughly 8.34 pounds per gallon, water is one of the easiest ways to add hundreds of pounds to an RV. Our 71-gallon fresh-water tank alone can hold about 592 pounds of water, and you also need to account for whatever ends up in the gray and black tanks. Know where your tanks are located, too, because their weight may affect one axle much more than the other.
4. Be brutally selective about what you actually NEED.
Full-time RV living probably isn’t compatible with a walk-in closet, a garage full of tools, every kitchen appliance you’ve ever purchased, and seventeen gadgets you might use someday. Wardrobes need to shrink, kitchen gadgets and cookware need to be selective, and tools get heavy incredibly fast. Electronics, books, outdoor gear, appliances, food, drinks—it all adds up. We’ve started asking ourselves a simple question: Will we actually use this regularly? If the answer is “probably not,” it doesn’t automatically earn a spot in the RV. Prioritize daily usefulness over “nice to have.”
5. Don’t just reduce weight—redistribute it.
Our weigh-in made this painfully obvious. We were 230 pounds over our rear axle rating while still having 1,000 pounds of capacity available on the front axle. That doesn’t mean we can magically transfer all that capacity to the rear, but it does mean that where we store things matters. If one axle is getting heavy, look for items that can safely be relocated to storage areas closer to the other axle. Just remember: moving something doesn’t reduce your total GVWR weight; it only changes how that weight is distributed.
6. If you have another vehicle, use it strategically.
For us, that’s the Subaru. Since we’re driving it separately anyway, it makes sense to put some of our heavier, less frequently used items in the car rather than carrying everything in the RV. If you’re towing a vehicle or trailer instead, the calculations are different because you’ll also need to consider your GCWR, hitch rating, tongue weight for trailers, and the ratings of the towed vehicle or trailer itself. Don’t assume that moving something out of the RV automatically means you’ve eliminated it from every relevant weight calculation.
The Biggest Lesson
Before this weigh-in, 230 pounds didn’t sound like much. On an 18,000-pound motorhome, it sounds almost insignificant. But that’s the wrong way to think about it. The ratings exist for a reason, and we’d much rather discover that we’re 230 pounds overweight while sitting safely on a CAT Scale than find out there was a problem somewhere down the highway.
Now we know exactly where we stand, what needs to change, and what we’ll be watching as we finish loading the RV for full-time life. And perhaps most importantly, we’ve learned one of the fundamental rules of RV living:
Everything you bring has to earn its weight.