What is Tire Load Rating? What Load Rating Do I Need?
April 20, 2021
Carry a lot of weight on your off-road rig? Well, stay tuned, because, in today's blog, we are taking a look at the biggest off-road tires with the most amount of weight-carrying capacity available.
Table of Contents
1. What is Load Rating/ Index?
2. How Do I Know Which Tire I Should Get?
What is Load Rating/ Index?
The load index is the heaviest load the tire can handle in pounds. For load ratings and load indexes, the higher the alphabet letter, the higher the load rating is. For load indexes. The higher the numbers are the higher the load-carrying capacity is.
How Do I Know Which Tire I Should Get?
The first place to start in figuring out this equation is knowing what the loaded weight of your rig is. That's all your tools, recovery gear, spare parts, full fuel tank or tanks and full auxiliary fuel and water tanks, tiny homes, whatever you may be hauling and/ or towing. If you really aren't sure, truck stops or even agricultural co-op companies will have a drive-on scale to get your total weight.
Then if it's just your rig and no trailer, divide the weight by 4 and that will give you the weight that each tire is carrying to figure out what the weight rating of the tire needs to be.
A 10,000 lb rig needs each tire to carry a minimum of 2,500 lbs. Now I don't know about you, but if I'm driving a 10,000 lb vehicle, I would not feel comfortable running a tire rated at 2500 lbs, which is pretty close to what a "C" load rated tire is. If I know I need a minimum of 2,500 lbs/ tire, then I will be looking for a tire that is rated at almost 2x the weight, but that's me.
I'd be looking at an "E" load or "F" load-rated tire for that extra sense of security as your tires are the only thing connecting your vehicle to the road and a blowout from overloading the tire can turn real bad really fast. For reference, an "E" load-rated tire can carry about 3,090 lbs and an "F" load-rated tire can handle about 3,950 lbs.
Important Tip
One important thing to note is that when looking at the max weight load ratings is that those ratings are measured at the tires' max air pressures and you may not always plan on running the maximum amount of air pressure in your tires. Therefore, at lower tire pressures, the tire will not have the same max-load-weight-rating so just make sure and keep that in mind when searching for the right tire for your particular application.
Like always, remember that we offer free shipping, mounting, and balancing on all wheel and tire packages. We also offer as low as 0% APR financing for those who qualify, so you can build now and pay later.
