2026 Forest RiverAurora Light 26BHS

The 26BHS is the Aurora Light most families end up cross-shopping: rear bunks, a U-dinette on the street-side slide, a front bedroom and a camp-side outside kitchen under the 15-foot awning. It is one of only two plans in the Light roster (with the 28QBUNK) the factory offers with 50-amp service and second-air-conditioner prep — the hot-climate option the value tier usually skips.

The build is the tandem-class standard: 6-foot-9 interior, two LP bottles, three-burner cooktop, 10.7-cubic-foot GE 12-volt refrigerator, 13,500-BTU GE ducted heat pump, GE tankless water heater, seamless lifetime-warranty roof, Norco electromagnetic powder-coated chassis, with the enclosed-underbelly option available on slide models. The factory prints a 7,566-pound GVWR; 6,066 plus 1,500 equals it exactly.

At 6,066 dry on a 774-pound tongue this is solid half-ton work. Eight berths against 1,500 pounds of margin is the arithmetic to respect — and buyers who need a fourth sleeping zone should read the 28QBUNK flagship.

Forest River's Aurora Light line — the lightweight tier of the Aurora family: a 2026 roster that runs from 16-foot single-axle X-series compacts a mid-size SUV can pull to a 36-foot-2 quad-bunk family flagship, on the same Norco electromagnetic powder-coated chassis with a 13,500-BTU GE ducted heat-pump air conditioner, a GE tankless water heater and a seamless roof membrane standard. Eight plans are profiled in depth; the full roster including catalogued, deferred and dealer-stock-only plans lives on the Aurora Light hub with verified weights.

This floorplan carries its water comfortably. A full 38-gallon fresh tank is roughly 21% of the 1,500-pound cargo capacity, leaving the Aurora Light 26BHS with a usable gear budget even when you tow full.

The published dry tongue weight of 774 pounds is 13% of the 6,066-pound dry weight, which sits inside the 10–15% band usually quoted for stable towing. It is still a dry figure: loading the front pass-through and the fresh tank both push it up.

Nothing above changes the ceiling. Loaded to its 7,566-pound GVWR the Aurora Light 26BHS is towing 1,500 pounds more than its 6,066-pound dry figure, and that is the number your vehicle has to be rated for — not the brochure weight.

Tank balance is generous here: 38 gallons of fresh against 44 grey and 30 black, so waste capacity keeps pace with supply and the fresh tank is the constraint that ends a dry stay.

Ranked by GVWR, the Aurora Light 26BHS sits 7 of 8 in the Aurora Light line: 7,566 pounds against a line that runs from 4,454 to 8,874 pounds. That position is the useful thing to know, because the plans immediately either side of it are the real alternatives.

Either side of it in the same line: Aurora Light 23MKS is 412 pounds lighter at 7,154 lb GVWR; and Aurora Light 28QBUNK is 1,308 pounds heavier at 8,874 lb GVWR.

Against the Aurora Light 26BHS: the Salem & Wildwood 240BHXL is 4 lb heavier and 2 ft shorter and sleeps 1 fewer; the Cascade 26LPC is 6 lb lighter and 1 ft shorter; the Cherokee Grey Wolf 26LP is 9 lb heavier and 1 ft shorter and sleeps 2 fewer. Those are differences in the published numbers only — what they cost, how they are built and how they live are separate questions each of those pages answers on its own terms.

Those are the nearest travel trailers from other lines by weight — one per line, picked by proximity on that figure and nothing else. They are listed so the same tow vehicle can be checked against real alternatives, not because they are equivalent inside; layout, build and price diverge sharply across that group.

For scale, the Aurora Light floorplans profiled here run 3,109 to 7,374 pounds dry and 20 to 36 feet of exterior length across 8 plans. Where a floorplan falls in that spread usually says more about which vehicle can tow it, and which site it fits, than the layout name does.

Every profiled floorplan in this line, with the full weight table, is on the Aurora Light line hub.

This catalog tracks 18 specification fields per floorplan. Named sources publish 15 of them for the Aurora Light 26BHS. The rest are not shown, because the alternative is reading a figure across from a sibling floorplan or from what the segment usually does — and a number nobody published is worth less than an admitted gap.

Not published for this floorplan: slide count, tire specification, awning. If you find one of these in a manufacturer document for this plan, it belongs on this page.

The completeness figure at the foot of this page (94%) measures the same thing on the full field set: it is a measurement of how much this floorplan’s manufacturer publishes, not of how much research went into the page.

How every figure here was sourced and checked is set out on the methodology page.