2026 Cougar Half-Ton25RDS

The Cougar Half-Ton 25RDS is built around a layout couples ask for again and again: a real private front bedroom and a rear living room, in a travel trailer a half-ton truck can pull. A king bed sits in a walk-around front bedroom with its own exterior entry door, the rear of the coach is given over to a lounge with theater seating and a fireplace, and a walk-through bath connects the two with dual entry doors. It sleeps six on paper — a tri-fold sleeper sofa and the dinette handle guests — but this is fundamentally a two-person coach that spends its 30 feet on living space rather than bunks.

It carries Keystone's full Cougar Half-Ton build: a five-sided aluminum superstructure, laminated HyperCore composite sidewalls, HyperDeck water-resistant flooring, a walkable TPO roof under a lifetime limited roofing warranty, and a forced-air heated, enclosed underbelly under the Climate Guard four-season package. Tandem 4,400-pound axles ride on Goodyear Endurance E-rated tires, and the drop-frame chassis opens a large front pass-through. A 10-cubic-foot 12-volt Norcold refrigerator, a tankless water heater and a 50-amp service round out a well-equipped lightweight trailer.

A tow caution worth stating plainly: Keystone publishes an 885-pound dry tongue weight, but that figure is a pre-production estimate for an empty trailer. Owners who have put loaded 25RDS trailers on a scale have reported tongue weights well above that — in some cases past 1,200–1,300 pounds once water, gear and the pass-through are loaded, enough to exceed the rated payload of a typical half-ton once passengers are aboard. The 2,293-pound payload is generous for a couples' trailer, but weigh it loaded and match it to your truck honestly before relying on the brochure number. For couples who want a private bedroom and a rear lounge without a heavy truck, the 25RDS is one of the segment's default picks — bought with eyes open on real tongue weight.

Keystone's Cougar splits into two families. The full-size Cougar is the heavier flagship fifth wheel — 5,100-pound axles, H-rated tires and roughly 13′4″ of height. The Cougar Half-Ton line is engineered to be towable by a properly equipped half-ton truck, and Keystone offers it as both a fifth wheel and a travel trailer — lighter 4,400-pound axles, Goodyear Endurance tires, and lower pin or tongue weights. The 25RDS on this page is highlighted; each other profiled plan links to its own page. The full Cougar catalogue runs to dozens of floorplans across both families; the highest-demand layouts are detailed here and the rest are catalogued on the line hub.

This floorplan carries its water comfortably. A full 54-gallon fresh tank is roughly 20% of the 2,293-pound cargo capacity, leaving the 25RDS with a usable gear budget even when you tow full.

The published dry tongue weight of 885 pounds is 13% of the 6,640-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.

Tank balance is generous here: 54 gallons of fresh against 60 grey and 30 black, so waste capacity keeps pace with supply and the fresh tank is the constraint that ends a dry stay.

Of the 8 Cougar floorplans profiled here, the 25RDS is the lightest by dry weight at 6,640 pounds — the entry point to the line and the one most likely to suit a vehicle already at its limit.

Either side of it in the same line: Cougar 28BHS is 750 pounds heavier at 7,390 lb dry.

Against the 25RDS: the Minnie 2832FK is 4 lb lighter and 2 ft longer and sleeps 1 fewer; the Wildwood Heritage Glen 25BHHL is 7 lb lighter and 4 ft longer; the Salem Hemisphere & Heritage Glen 25BHHL is 7 lb lighter and 4 ft longer and sleeps 4 more. 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 Cougar floorplans profiled here run 6,640 to 11,625 pounds dry and 28 to 39 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 Cougar line hub.

This catalog tracks 18 specification fields per floorplan. Named sources publish 15 of them for the 25RDS. 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: GVWR, exterior width, interior height, tire size (a tire description is published, a size is not). 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 (90%) 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.

Values on this page carrying an asterisk were derived by arithmetic from published figures, or come from a single source, rather than being printed directly by the manufacturer. The flag travels with the number into the downloadable spec sheet.

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