How Much Can a Jeep Gladiator Tow? 7,700 lb, Doors On

A 2026 Gladiator has four doors and a three-piece roof that come off without tools, and the owner's manual is specific about where they may not go once they are off. Not inside the vehicle, on the grounds that they can fly around in a sudden stop or a collision. That leaves the driveway or the bed, and the bed sits behind the rear axle.

Jeep never says what any of it weighs. The manual answers with a labor instruction: two people are required to remove and install each door, and taking the hard top off calls for four adults, one on each corner. The specification is written in people, and nowhere in pounds.

One owner did put the parts on a scale. In June 2025 he weighed the set off his own 2020 Gladiator Sport and wrote down 60 lb for each of the four doors, 35 lb for both front roof panels and 60 lb for the rear section: 335 lb in total. Doors and Freedom Top are common JT hardware, and the 4,741 lb of base weight Jeep prints for its best-towing 2026 build counts an equivalent set. Where those 335 lb end up decides whether the truck is any lighter for it, and the answer reaches the trailer question as well.

How much can a Jeep Gladiator tow?

A 2026 Jeep Gladiator's maximum trailer weight is 7,700 lb on a Sport S built with the Max Tow Package with 4.10 Axle Ratio, and Jeep's specifications sheet prints four other rows underneath it: three at 6,000 lb and the Rubicon at 7,000 lb. One powertrain runs the whole lineup, a 3.6-liter Pentastar V-6 making 285 hp and 260 lb-ft through the 850RE 8-speed automatic, with four-wheel drive standard and no manual or diesel offered.

That leaves fewer variables than most midsize trucks have. There is one crew cab, one 60.3-inch box and one 137.3-inch wheelbase, so body style moves nothing. Trim, axle ratio and tow package move everything.

The Sport row hides a condition, and it is the row most Gladiators on the road sit on. Its 6,000 lb figure carries an asterisk reading "If equipped with ADH Tow Package," where the 2025 edition of the same sheet gave that row 4,500 lb with nothing attached. The fleet guide spells the same option code out as the Trailer Tow and Auxiliary Switch Group (ADH). For the 2026 model year there is no published trailer figure at all for a Sport with no tow package, so 6,000 lb on that row is a packaged number.

The axle ratings run flat across the sheet: 3,100 lb at the front on every row except the Mojave, which gets 3,300 lb, and 3,750 lb at the rear on all five. The US towing capacity chart puts those five rows next to every other midsize truck.

Why does one 6,000 lb row miss its own combined rating?

Because Jeep's sheet prints a formula in its own footnote, and on the Sport 3.73 row that formula lands 1,195 lb above the combined rating printed beside it. The footnote reads: "GCWR = Base Weight + Maximum Trailer Weight + 150 lbs. for driver." Run it down the five rows and four of them clear.

The clearest way to see it is to put the two 3.73 rows side by side, because they print the same trailer figure. A Willys on 3.73 gears is allowed 6,000 lb and its combined rating has 140 lb spare once Jeep's own formula is applied. A Sport on 3.73 gears is allowed the same 6,000 lb and comes out 1,195 lb the other side of its 9,650 lb, before a driver, a passenger or a pound of gear.

Read the same row from the combined figure instead and it gives a different trailer number. Take 4,695 lb of truck and a 150 lb driver out of 9,650 lb and 4,805 lb of trailer is what is left, close to the 4,500 lb the 2025 sheet printed for that row.

Nothing published settles which of two things happened. Either Jeep raised the packaged Sport's trailer figure for 2026 and left the combined rating where it was, or the 6,000 lb came across from the Willys row directly beneath it. The working answer is the same under both readings: plan against the lower of the two trailer figures, which on a 3.73-geared Sport is the 4,805 lb the combined rating leaves rather than the 6,000 lb the trailer column prints.

What comes off a Gladiator, and what does it weigh?

Jeep publishes no weight for any door, panel or top, so the usable figures come from an owner's scale, from Mopar's packaging data quoted by a parts seller, and from retail shipping weights. Mopar's packaging figures corroborate the owner's hard-top numbers to within about 6 percent. The doors rest on owner scales alone, because Mopar publishes no door figure at all.

The soft top runs against the guess most people make about it. An owner comparing Quadratec's shipping weights in September 2022 found the twill soft top listed at 124 lb against 85 lb for a hard top with its panels; the parts seller in the same thread showed 87 lb. Shipping weights carry packaging, so what those listings give you is a direction and not a part weight. Jeep adds one instruction of its own: the soft top is not designed to carry any additional load.

Jeep's own weight for the truck is not perfectly still either. The Rubicon appears twice in the 2026 specifications sheet: 5,069 lb in the curb-weight table on page 5, and 5,031 lb as Base Wt. in the towing table four pages later, a 38 lb disagreement inside one document, with the 1,100 lb payload sitting on the row that carries the lighter figure. In the 2025 edition the same mismatch sat on the Willys.

Where the 335 lb goes matters because the manual has already closed off the obvious third option, the cab. On a tow the parts either stay in the driveway or they ride in the bed, and the bed sits behind the rear axle. Jeep's own sheet puts 2,162 lb of base weight over the rear axle of the Max Tow row against a 3,750 lb rear axle rating, which is where any pounds moved back there land. What that position costs on a short Jeep belongs to the Wrangler page. One configuration is out of the question either way: the windshield folds down, but the manual restricts that to off-road use at 10 mph, so it is not a state a Gladiator tows in.

Can you tow a Gladiator with the doors and top off?

Jeep's 2026 manual says the door-removal procedure is furnished for off-road operation only and warns against driving on public roads with the doors off, and it sends owners to a dealer for a cowl-mounted mirror because federal law requires outside mirrors for on-road use. The mirrors are bolted to the doors, so the doors and the mirrors leave together. Blind Spot Monitoring goes unavailable at the same moment, along with the power mirrors and power door locks.

A rental counter reads the same configuration, from the outside. U-Haul's published tow-vehicle requirements say the vehicle must be equipped with a hard top if it is an SUV or select Jeeps, must have external mirrors on both sides, and must have a curb weight above the loaded weight of the trailer. The first two of those describe things a Gladiator owner changes in a driveway.

Owners in a July 2024 thread describe what they do about it. One tows with the doors off and drops the freedom panels in the bed on arrival. Another keeps it to local trips and back roads, because his wife is unenthusiastic about highway speeds with a door missing. A third towed a 3,500 lb pop-up an hour to the beach with the doors and top off. Every one of those is a decision about where the parts ride rather than whether they come off.

Is payload the first thing a Gladiator runs out of?

Usually payload, and the owners who tow these trucks name it first. In a February 2025 thread one put it plainly: Gladiators are often capped on their legal towing by payload rather than by the tow figure, and the advice attached was to take the truck to a CAT scale with a full tank and yourself in it. A Rubicon owner in the same thread reported 1,066 lb on his own truck, noted that every modification eats into it, and pointed out that a weight-distributing hitch counts against it as well. Almost three months later a '23 Willys owner posted his window sticker asking what he could tow and what he could put in the bed, and collected four different answers before someone sent him to the tire and loading information placard in his own door frame.

Part of why it is a hunt at all is that the towing figures and the carrying figures are split across two Jeep documents. The only GVWR published for any 2026 Gladiator sits in a fleet document instead of on the specifications sheet: the 2026 Fleet Buyer's Guide describes the Max Tow Package with 4.10 Axle Ratio and, inside that description, states a Gross Vehicle Weight Rating (GVWR) of 6,500 lb, with the automatic transmission required. The specifications sheet gives that same configuration 4,741 lb of base weight.

Against that row Jeep prints 1,720 lb of payload, and jeep.com attaches the figure to Sport S models. Take the sheet's base weight away from the fleet guide's rating and the answer lands 39 lb above the printed figure. One number comes out of the Fleet Buyer's Guide and the other out of the specifications sheet, and nothing published closes the distance between them. What settles it for one specific truck is the certification label on that truck's own driver's door pillar, which is stamped once the build is finished.

A Sport S with the Max Tow Package weighed 4,907 lb on a CAT scale in August 2022, straight off the line with nothing added since. Its door label read 6,250 lb of GVWR and 1,343 lb for occupants and cargo, and 6,250 minus 1,343 is that same 4,907. Two more owners in that thread weighed 4,900 lb and 5,220 lb. Those are 2022 trucks carrying 2022 labels, so the figures belong to them and to nothing else, and the part that carries forward is the direction: a door label reads lower than a brochure by enough to matter.

Take the doors and the roof off and the truck is lighter. Whether the trailer question moved depends on where those 335 lb went, and there are two answers. Left at home, they come off every total. Loaded into the bed, they come off nothing at all; they change position, from the sides and the roof to behind the rear axle.

Here is that row with something real hitched to it. Heartland publishes its 2027 Prowler 2500BH at 6,000 lb of trailer GVWR and 4,185 lb dry, a dual-axle bunkhouse of the size a Max Tow Gladiator gets shopped against. Put the Gladiator and the Prowler into Can I Tow It? and four lines come back on one screen. One reads the Prowler at its full 6,000 lb against the truck's 7,700 lb figure. One reads its 4,185 lb dry against that same 6,000 lb, which is the trailer's own room to pack. A third puts the truck's own weight, with the load on the hitch ball added, under the 6,500 lb GVWR. The fourth adds truck and trailer together and holds the total under the 12,850 lb combined rating. Those four together return pass (well matched). The GVWR line finishes with about 1,010 lb spare, the smallest of the four margins and the one the doors and the roof sit inside. The other two verdicts the check returns are caution (careful) and fail (no).

Two tongue boxes in that link are left empty, for two different reasons. The Tongue weight rating box on the vehicle side is blank because Jeep publishes no such rating for the 2026 Gladiator. The Expected loaded tongue weight box on the trailer side is blank because this Prowler's coupler has never been on a scale. For the second one the tool supplies the middle of the US band, 12.5% of the trailer's rated weight, which is 750 lb here. The vehicle's rating box being empty leaves that 750 lb with no coupling row to grade it against, so the check lists tongue weight as not assessed and folds the 750 lb into the truck's own weight inside the 6,500 lb GVWR line. An owner towing behind a 2022 Sport S with the Max Tow Package reported his own starting tongue weight at 750 to 800 lb before he moved things around inside the trailer.

Every one of those four lines starts from 4,741 lb, and on this truck that number describes a particular weekend more than it describes the vehicle. Leave the doors and the roof at home and the GVWR line starts 335 lb lower, a third again on top of the 1,010 lb it already had. Put them in the bed and the line does not move by a pound. Either way the 1,010 lb still has the people and whatever else is going in the bed to come out of it, because the link carries the truck empty. Both the browser check and the app's demo rig are free to work through.

loadmate provides decision support for towing safety, not legal weight certification. Score, compliance checks, and trip readiness are based on the data you enter and the regulator information current at the time of release. For legal weight evidence, use a certified truck scale / CAT scale. Towing remains the operator's responsibility. See /safety-disclaimer.

Owners on something other than Max Tow start somewhere else. Start a Rubicon from its own published figures and it carries 7,000 lb of maximum trailer weight, a 12,450 lb combined rating and the towing table's 5,031 lb of base weight. Jeep publishes no GVWR for that configuration, so that field arrives blank and gets filled from the certification label in the door pillar, then the trailer's two weights go in underneath.

What is the maximum tongue weight for a Gladiator hitch?

Jeep publishes no tongue-weight rating for the 2026 Gladiator. The owner's manual hands the question to the hardware, and tells owners not to go past the maximum tongue weight stamped on the bumper or the trailer hitch. The fleet guide says the same thing in fleet language, that recommended tongue weight is determined by the class of hitch receiver and the hardware limits of the upfit. Ford leaves a comparable hole in the F-150's paperwork, and what that does to an owner is worked through on that page.

What the manual does print is the industry hitch-class table: Class I at 2,000 lb, Class II at 3,500 lb, Class III at 6,000 lb, Class IV at 10,000 lb of trailer weight. The Max Tow Package includes a Class IV receiver, and Mopar's own listing for the part gives it 7,650 lb of towing capacity with no tongue figure beside it. Owners have gone looking for years; a 2021 thread ran four pages on whether one part number could carry 600 lb behind one trim and 765 lb behind another, and ended without a published answer.

Those 2022-era figures came from somewhere real. The 2022 owner's manual printed a full trailer-towing table with a tongue column in it, and its Max Tow row read 765 lb against 7,650 lb of trailer. That is one model year's figure for one model year's truck, and the rest of its rows, including the two configurations Jeep has since dropped, are set out further down. One tongue number does appear in the 2026 manual, 350 lb. It is attached to a ball bolted through the fascia or the bumper rather than to anything in the receiver, and it arrives with a 3,500 lb trailer cap and a 20 sq ft frontal-area allowance of its own.

Whatever the stamp on your own hitch says, the pounds it governs sit on the truck and come out of what it can carry, which is the half of the arithmetic covered in tongue weight vs payload.

How much can a used Jeep Gladiator tow?

Less than page-one search results suggest, because two of the three configurations those results quote stopped being built after the 2023 model year. The 3.0-liter EcoDiesel V-6 and the 6-speed manual both left the lineup then, and both still appear in figures quoted for the truck today.

The 7,650 lb maximum in that last row is the one the 7,700 lb figure replaced when the JT took its mid-cycle refresh for 2024. A 4,000 lb figure quoted for a Gladiator is a manual-transmission row from a truck built no later than 2023, and a 6,500 lb figure is the diesel. The Overland trim that turns up throughout older forum threads is not part of the 2026 lineup at all.

Two other things belong on a used inspection list. The 2025 Gladiator carries NHTSA campaign 26V363000, opened on June 4, 2026, covering the hydraulic power steering pump. And on any used truck the certification label and the tire and loading placard in its own door frame are the figures that count, because a specifications row describes a build while those two labels describe the one truck they are stuck to.

What did Jeep change on the Gladiator for 2026?

The headline ratings held and the hardware behind the removable parts changed. Jeep's November 20, 2025 release leads on an enhanced door hinge system that makes door removal quicker and easier than ever, and adds a Willys '41 model, optional aggressive all-terrain tires for the Sport S and two new colors. Powertrain, transmission and maximum towing carried over, and payload moved by single digits on some rows. Owners noticed: the forum thread on the quick-release hinges collected 45 watchers and ran to 11 pages, with follow-ups still going in April 2026.

The rating rows moved in smaller ways. The Willys gained 75 lb of payload, from 950 lb to 1,025 lb, on a base weight up 58 lb; the Sport 3.73 gave up 25 lb of payload as its own base weight rose 33 lb; and the Max Tow row slipped from 1,725 lb to 1,720 lb.

Somewhere between the 2022 manual and the 2026 one, the paperwork itself shifted. The current manual no longer prints a trailer-towing table at all, giving four steps for finding the figures on jeep.com, and jeep.com publishes one of them. Subaru leaves Forester owners in the same position, and the Subaru Forester page picks that up. The bumper-ball frontal-area allowance also reads 20 sq ft in the 2026 manual where the 2022 manual read 30 sq ft, on the same 3,500 lb and 350 lb limits. Which model year either of them landed in is not something those two manuals settle.

One safety campaign is open against the current truck. NHTSA 26V456000, reported July 16, 2026, covers 2026 Gladiator and Wrangler vehicles whose steel wheel walls may be too thin, with owner letters expected from September 4, 2026. Steel wheels are the Sport's standard fitment.

Making the doors quicker to remove means the configuration changes more often, not less. What a Gladiator weighed on the day someone last checked is a dated fact about one weekend, and by the next one it may describe a different truck. loadmate Pro is where that stops being a memory. The record holds which truck it was: the doors, the front panels and the rear section each logged on the date they came off or went back on, against the Gladiator they came off, so an October answer is never quietly running on a July weight. A worked version of the same log sits on the app's demo rig, which is enough to see its shape before your own truck goes into one.

Related guides

Ten guides pick up where this page stops: seven on the ratings and documents behind the rows above, two on trucks that reach their answers out of different paperwork, and the chart that lines them all up.

• What can I tow?: the same question with no badge on it, and which trailers each capacity tier really covers
• Towing weight ratings explained: what a 12,850 lb combined rating is counting, and what an axle rating is separate from
• Payload vs towing capacity: the column Gladiator owners keep saying runs out first, and why
• Tongue weight vs payload: 750 lb on the hitch ball, counted against what the truck is allowed to carry
• Weight-distribution hitch and front-axle load: what the hardware Jeep recommends above 2,000 lb actually moves
• Weigh a travel trailer at a CAT scale: the measured tongue figure that replaces the tool's 12.5% estimate
• How to read a CAT scale ticket: the axle lines, read against the ratings your own door label carries
• How much can a Jeep Wrangler tow?: the same doors on a shorter vehicle with nowhere to put them, and what the overhang does
• How much can a Chevy Colorado tow?: another midsize truck at 7,700 lb, with a different set of conditions attached
• How much can a Jeep Grand Cherokee tow?: the Jeep whose towing tables stayed in the glovebox book while the rules that govern them did not
• How much can a Toyota Highlander tow?: the other page where U-Haul's rules meet a lineup, on arithmetic rather than configuration
• Towing capacity chart: where the Gladiator's five rows sit among the other midsize trucks