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Towing a trailer or car behind a motorhome: what the law actually says

GVW, GTW, standard licence, B96 or BE: the real rules for towing a trailer, a boat or a small trailer behind a motorhome — and why almost no rental includes it.

The question comes up every spring, on forums and in emails to rental operators alike: “can I hitch my bike trailer, my small luggage trailer, or the in-laws' boat to the back of a motorhome?” The honest answer comes down to three checks, in this order: the vehicle's registration document, your licence, and the rental contract. Here's how they fit together.

The registration document comes before the licence

A motorhome isn't automatically approved for towing. In the EU, the answer sits in the vehicle's registration fields for maximum towable mass (braked and unbraked). If that field is blank or shows zero, the vehicle simply isn't type-approved to tow — no licence changes that. Many professional motorhomes are approved, but with a modest towing capacity: payload margin is already tight near the 3.5-tonne mark, so manufacturers often cap the braked trailer at 750 kg or 1,500 kg.

Which licence for which trailer (the French rules, as a useful benchmark)

Once approval is confirmed, most European systems — France's is a clear example — draw three lines:

One detail that often surprises people: once the trailer exceeds 500 kg, motorway speed is capped at 110 km/h instead of 130 km/h in France — worth factoring into your route time.

A rental motorhome is a different story

This is where theory meets practice: even when a motorhome is approved to tow and you hold the right licence, almost nothing on the rental market — peer-to-peer listings and professional fleets alike — actually comes fitted with a tow hitch, and most contracts explicitly exclude towing from the included insurance and roadside assistance. The reason is simple: a hitch changes how the vehicle handles, wears the clutch and gearbox differently, and shifts liability onto you if anything goes wrong on the road. Some platforms address the question directly in their help pages — a sign it comes up often, not that it's solved by default. If towing is essential to your trip, the only reliable path is to ask the owner or agency explicitly before booking, and get written confirmation of what's actually covered.

The American exception, which isn't really one

In the United States, towing a small car behind a large Class A RV — the well-known practice of toad towing, flat-towing the car on all four wheels — is common among full-time RVers, letting them get around town once the motorhome is parked at a campground. But it's an owner's setup, built around a tow bar, a baseplate permanently fitted to the towed car, and often a supplemental braking system required by individual states. The big American rental fleets (Cruise America, RVshare, Outdoorsy) almost universally ban towing anything behind their vehicles too — for the same insurance reasons as in Europe. Even in the home of toad towing, it isn't a rental option.

What physics says: why a trailer turns dangerous at speed

This isn't just a regulatory quirk: a towed combination can become unstable above a certain speed, a phenomenon engineers call snaking — the trailer's sway amplifying into ever-wider oscillations. A landmark study by R. S. Sharp and M. A. Alonso Fernández, published in 2002 in the Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, modelled this behaviour and showed that friction at the hitch point and how the load is distributed on the trailer directly determine the critical speed at which instability sets in (Google Scholar page). In practice: always load a trailer with heavy items low and toward the front, never exceed its rated mass, and if it starts to sway, the right response is to ease off the throttle gradually — never to brake hard.

The real alternatives, often simpler

Before reaching for a trailer, it's often easier to shrink the problem instead: an approved bike rack mounts straight onto the hitch or rear chassis without any of a trailer's constraints, a roof box rented with the vehicle absorbs bulky gear, and renting a small second car locally — rather than towing one from home — is usually cheaper than a trailer plus the licence to pull it. If you're buying rather than renting and regular towing is part of the plan, check the towing-capacity field before you buy: our guide to the C1 licence and motorhomes covers everything else that changes past 3.5 tonnes, and our guide to which licence for a motorhome is the best starting point if towing, in the end, isn't actually your question.

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