Every RV has that one storage compartment. It's deep, it runs the width of the rig, and everything you need is at the back of it. To get the levelling blocks or the sewer hose or the spare chairs, you're on your knees with your head and shoulders inside the bay, reaching into the dark, pulling everything out to get to the one thing at the back. It's the daily indignity of RV storage, and it's completely unnecessary.
A sliding tray fixes it. It's a platform on heavy-duty drawer slides that mounts in your storage bay, and it brings the whole contents of the compartment out to you at the pull of a handle. Everything the bay holds comes into the daylight where you can see it and reach it, instead of you going in after it.
It sounds like a small thing until you've lived with one. The difference between kneeling in the dirt reaching into a black hole and simply sliding your gear out to waist height is the difference between dreading a compartment and actually using it. And they carry serious weight, so this isn't just for light gear — a loaded tray of tools and levelling blocks rolls out as easily as an empty one.
This roundup covers the sliding trays and slide assemblies that fit different jobs — big cargo bays, batteries, coolers and fridges — so you can match the tray to what you're trying to reach.
Best for: The big full-width pass-through storage bay
The MORryde Sliding Cargo Tray in 48 by 90 inches is the largest tray in the range, sized for the deep, full-width pass-through storage bays on bigger fifth wheels and motorhomes.
The full-width pass-through bay is exactly the compartment that most needs a tray, and it's the one that suffers most without one. It's cavernous, it's accessible from both sides, and things migrate to the middle where you can't reach them from either door. A 90-inch tray brings the entire depth of that bay out into the open.
MORryde builds these to carry real weight on heavy-duty slides, which matters because a bay this size ends up holding the heavy gear — the levelling blocks, the tools, the outdoor kit, the things you'd rather not haul out by hand. A loaded tray gliding out on proper slides is the whole point; it has to roll easily with a few hundred pounds on it, and these do.
The size is the thing to get right. Measure your bay carefully — depth, width and the door opening — before choosing a tray, because it needs to fit the compartment and clear the opening. This is the largest option, for the largest bays; smaller compartments take smaller trays.
A tray this size also changes how you can load the bay in the first place. Because everything becomes reachable, you can pack the full depth of the compartment properly rather than leaving the hard-to-reach back half half-empty, which is what people do with a bay they can't get into. In practice, a tray often gives you back usable storage you already had but weren't using, which is a nice bonus on top of the access itself.
Buy MORryde Sliding Cargo Tray 48" x 90"
Best for: Smaller storage compartments that still bury their contents
The MORryde CTG60-2648W Cargo Slide Tray in 26 by 48 inches brings the same slide-out convenience to a more modest compartment.
Not every storage bay is a cavern, and the smaller compartments benefit from a tray just as much — arguably more, because a small deep bay is even more awkward to reach into than a large one. This is the tray for the mid-sized compartment that holds your hoses, your electrical leads, your chocks and the everyday gear you're into constantly.
The reason to match the tray to the compartment rather than just buying the biggest one is simple: a tray that's too big won't fit, and a tray that's much smaller than the bay wastes the space around it. The 26 by 48 size suits a genuinely common RV compartment, and it turns that compartment from a reach-in to a pull-out.
As with all of these, measure before you order. The tray has to fit the bay's internal dimensions and pass through its door opening, and those are fixed numbers in your rig. Get them right, and installation is straightforward.
Buy MORryde Sliding Cargo Tray 26" x 48"
Best for: Getting heavy batteries out where you can actually service them
The MORryde Sliding Battery Tray in 24 by 24 inches is a dedicated tray built specifically for the job of holding and accessing batteries.
Batteries are the perfect argument for a slide-out tray, because they're heavy, they need periodic attention, and they're almost always tucked into a miserable, cramped location. Checking water levels, cleaning terminals, or lifting a battery out for replacement means wrestling a heavy, awkward, acid-filled box out of a tight space — exactly the situation a sliding tray is made for.
A dedicated battery tray brings the whole bank out to you so you can service it properly instead of by feel in a dark corner. That's not just convenient; it's the difference between maintaining your batteries regularly and neglecting them because reaching them is such a chore — and battery neglect is one of the commonest and most expensive failures in RV life.
The tray is built to take the substantial weight of a battery bank on slides that stay smooth under that load. Match the size to your battery box and the space you've got, and you turn battery maintenance from a dreaded job into a simple one.
There's a safety angle here too, particularly for lead-acid batteries. They need checking, they can vent gas, and they hold a lot of energy, and doing anything with them in a cramped, awkward space is where accidents happen — a dropped spanner across terminals, a strained back lifting one out. Bringing the bank out to waist height on a stable tray makes every one of those tasks safer, not just easier.
Buy MORryde Sliding Battery Tray 24" x 24"
Best for: A portable fridge or cooler you want to reach without unloading the bay
The MORryde Sliding Freezer Tray is a front-facing pull-out tray built specifically for a cooler or a portable fridge or freezer.
Portable 12-volt fridges and freezers have transformed how people travel, but they create a specific storage problem: they're heavy, they open from the top, and you need to get into them regularly. Buried in a storage bay, a top-opening fridge is useless — you can't lift the lid with the bay above it, and you can't reach in.
A front-facing slide tray solves it by bringing the fridge out of the bay so the lid clears and you can actually get to your food and drinks. That's the whole point of carrying a portable fridge in the first place — easy access to cold provisions — and without a tray to bring it out, a bay-mounted fridge defeats itself.
This is a purpose-built solution rather than a general cargo tray, sized and configured for the job of carrying a cooler or fridge and letting it open. If you travel with a portable fridge in a storage bay, it's the tray that makes that setup actually work.
Buy MORryde Sliding Freezer Tray
Best for: A second refrigerator or freezer, with drainage built in
The Kwikee Refrigerator/Freezer Slide Tray makes access to an RV freezer or extra fridge more convenient, with a 200 lb capacity and an opening in the bottom of the tray for drainage and air circulation.
The drainage opening is the clever detail that sets this apart, and it's exactly what a fridge or freezer tray needs that a plain cargo tray doesn't. Refrigeration units produce condensation and need airflow around them to run efficiently, and the cutout in the base of this tray handles both — letting water drain away and air circulate rather than pooling under the unit.
At 200 lbs capacity, it's sized for the weight of a loaded portable fridge or freezer, which is heavier than people expect once it's full of food and ice packs. This is a Kwikee-engineered slide, and Kwikee is a long-established name in RV slide mechanisms, so the slide action is built to stay smooth under that load.
If you're carrying a second cooling unit — a chest freezer for long trips, or an extra fridge for the drinks — this is the tray designed around that specific job, drainage, airflow and all.
The airflow point deserves emphasising because it affects whether the fridge works properly at all. Portable compressor fridges shed heat, and a unit crammed into a sealed bay with no ventilation will struggle to cool and will run its compressor constantly trying. A tray that lets air move around the unit, and lets you slide it out into the open when you need it working hard, helps it run efficiently rather than fighting its own enclosure.
Buy Kwikee Refrigerator/Freezer Slide Tray
Best for: Building your own custom slide-out where no off-the-shelf tray fits
The Kwikee Heavy Duty Slide Assembly at 22 inches adjusts to any width compartment and provides a smooth, effortless extension, with a latch mechanism to hold it closed and a 200 lb capacity.
This is the option for when none of the ready-made trays fit your situation, and it's a genuinely useful thing to know exists. Rather than a complete tray, it's the slide mechanism itself — the heavy-duty runners and the latch — which you mount and build your own platform on top of. It adjusts to the width of your compartment, so it fits spaces a fixed-size tray never could.
The adjustable width is what makes it so flexible. An odd-sized compartment, a custom build, a bay with an obstruction in it — the situations where a standard tray won't work are exactly the ones this solves. You set the slides to your space and build the surface to suit whatever you're carrying.
The latch mechanism is an important detail that's easy to overlook: it holds the slide closed so your platform doesn't come rolling out on the road. On any slide-out, that positive latch is what stands between a tidy compartment and a tray full of gear sliding open on the first sharp bend. At 200 lb capacity, it handles a serious load once you've built your platform on it.
Buy Kwikee Heavy Duty Slide Assembly 22"
People often try to solve the buried-compartment problem by reorganising — bins, dividers, packing everything in a clever order. It helps a little, and it never really works, and it's worth understanding why.
The problem isn't organization; it's reach. However neatly you pack a deep bay, the things at the back are still at the back, and getting to them still means going in after them or pulling the front items out first. A tidy bay you can't reach into is still a bay you can't reach into.
A sliding tray attacks the actual problem, which is that the storage comes to you instead of you going to the storage. The whole contents of the compartment move out into the open together, so the item at the back is suddenly as easy to reach as the item at the front. No reorganising scheme achieves that, because none of them change the fundamental geometry of a deep hole with a small door.
That's why a tray is worth the cost and the fitting where a set of bins isn't. It doesn't make a badly-packed bay tidier — it makes the entire bay accessible, which is a different and much bigger win.
The trays on this list divide into a few clear jobs, and choosing well means starting with what you're trying to reach rather than with the tray itself.
For general storage — the levelling blocks, hoses, tools and outdoor gear — a cargo tray sized to your bay is the answer, and the whole decision comes down to measuring the compartment correctly. For batteries, a dedicated battery tray brings a heavy, maintenance-hungry item out where you can look after it. For a portable fridge or freezer, the purpose-built fridge trays with their drainage and top access are what make a bay-mounted cooler usable.
And for the situations none of those fit, the adjustable slide assembly lets you build exactly what you need. Start from the job, and the right tray follows.
This is the category where measuring matters most, because a tray is only useful if it fits, and the numbers are unforgiving.
You need three measurements: the internal depth of the bay, its internal width, and the size of the door opening the tray has to pass through. That last one catches people out — a tray can fit inside a bay perfectly and still be impossible to install if it won't go through the door. Measure the opening as carefully as the compartment.
Then account for the slides themselves, which take up a little space on each side, and for the clearance the tray needs to run freely. MORryde and Kwikee both offer their trays and assemblies in a range of sizes precisely because RV compartments vary so much, and matching the tray to your measurements is what turns this from a nuisance purchase into a perfect-fit upgrade.
A sliding storage tray is one of those upgrades that seems minor and turns out to change how you use your rig every single day. It takes the compartments you dreaded reaching into and brings their contents out to you, and it does it under real weight, so even your heaviest gear becomes easy to reach.
Start from what you're trying to access — general cargo, batteries, a portable fridge, or something custom — and choose the tray built for that job. Then measure the bay's depth, width, and door opening carefully, because in this category fit is everything.
Get it right, and the worst storage compartment in your rig becomes the easiest one to use. It's a small piece of engineering that pays you back every time you open that bay.
I’m Bill Rowell, the founder of RVupgrades.com. In 2002, I launched the business to help fellow RV enthusiasts find unique and hard-to-find products. Over the years, it’s grown to offer more than 15,000 items, with a warehouse in Eastlake, Ohio. Having owned and repaired nearly every type of RV, I bring over two decades of hands-on experience to the table. For me, this isn’t just a business – it’s a passion and a way of life that I love sharing with the RV community.
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