The numbers for January are in and it appears the RV industry is crashing.

If you remember last year, when I gave you monthly updates, they weren’t good. They weren’t good for a number of reasons.

  1. They were comparing last year’s shipments only to the previous bad year of 2024. So even a modest increase appeared positive. 2025 was not a good year for the industry.
  2. Travel trailers spent much of the year in negative territory on shipments. Travel trailers are the bread and butter of the RV industry. Five times more travel trailers are sold on a monthly basis than the second most popular RV – fifth wheels.

So, what’s happened since the endo of 2025? Well now we move forward to comparing this year’s numbers to last year’s very mediocre numbers. Right off the bat in January we are in the negative territory in a big way in all the towable categories.

Travel trailers are down 13.9% compared to January of 2025

Fifth wheels down 10.8%

Pop-up campers down 19.8%

Truck Campers down 4.6%

That’s a bleak month. If you remember I said late last year that it would be a buyers’ market on travel trailers. Well, I better start expanding that to cover all towables.

To finish this discussion off let’s talk about how I would measure the RV Shipment success rate. That would be with a rolling five-year average.

Let’s talk about how the RV industry as performed since 2008.

2008 saw a really bad recession and that negatively impacted the industry from 2009 through 2012. they went from producing over 300,000 a year in 2008, to averaging only 289,000 per year over the next five years.

In 2013, we saw them starting to grow again, producing an average of 439,000 units a year from 2013-2018. The standout years being 2017 (504,599) and 2018 (483,672). then in 2019things began to take a pretty big drop but then Covid came in and the numbers went through the roof. That’s when the quality hit an all-time low. That’s not to say that their previous banner 2017-year didn’t have a lot of quality complaints, it did. That’s why in my opinion, you see that the five years from 2020 to 2023, which includes the huge covid shipments, that the average drops to 434093.

Now look at 2023,24, and 25 as individual years and they are in the low 300,000 numbers. That hasn’t happened since 2013-2015. So, don’t fool yourselves, they are hurting. Some of this may be due to a saturated market, and my guess is that some of this is due to the bad rap on quality. Interest rates and gas prices haven’t been helping either.