But you can pull an 18000 lb ball/pintle hitch trailer with 10% hitch weight!
Reality is, the OP has figured out max trailer the way one should.
On other hand, yes as noted, if you use gvwr as the sums of the front and reAr axles, you could potentially have an additional 1000-3000+ lbs of payload, depending upon how you load things. IE how the weight is distributed.
I personally use the sum of for what I will use for max gvw. Or you could be a.real dare devil, us federal bridge law Mac, that would be 20,000 per axel, limited to 500 lbs per inch.width of tire, or about 5000-5500 per tire, or 20k lbs....I will not recommend this for most folks.
I would suggest OP look at a bigger truck if that trailer is over 12000 lbs potential.
Marty
