Horse Trailer Floors Explained: Wood, Aluminum and Rubber Composite

October 27, 2026

There are three common horse trailer floors: treated wood boards, aluminum planks, and rubber composite (Rumber boards, or systems like Polylast and WERM). Typical installed prices around Ocala: wood about $9 to $13 per square foot, aluminum $12 to $20, rubber composite $14 to $25. None of them survives neglect. The floor that lasts is the one whose mats come out on schedule.

The three floors side by side

Price build and sources are on the pricing page. For your floor size, use the floor calculator.

Wood

Wood is the cheapest floor. Flooring guides put a typical two-horse wood floor at $600 to $900, and one recommends keeping about 1/4 inch spacing between boards for ventilation. Wood fails by rotting, from urine and from water that cannot drain. It is also the easiest to repair in pieces: one 4 by 8 foot section runs about $290 plus lumber in published shop prices.

Wood’s weakness is that it fails quietly. A board can look fine from above and be soft where it sits on a crossmember. The screwdriver test on soft or spongy trailer floor is the check.

Aluminum

The four aluminum horse trailer makers we cover, Featherlite, Sundowner, Exiss and 4-Star, all write their floor care around rubber mats laid over the trailer floor. Aluminum is light and does not rot, but it corrodes, and a flooring guide notes horse urine is acidic and corrodes aluminum floorboards over time.

That is why the makers’ own manuals have mats-out schedules:

One guide recommends pulling the mats on an aluminum floor and rinsing and fully drying mats and trailer at least five times a year. When aluminum does corrode, posters on a horse trailer forum suggest patching or plating over just the damaged area instead of a whole floor; marine-grade aluminum sheet runs about $3 to $10 per square foot before labor. See aluminum corrosion and white powder.

Rubber composite

Rumber is one brand of rubber composite trailer flooring. Guides put Rumber at $1,000 to $2,000 depending on trailer size, the most expensive option. Polylast and WERM are other rubber flooring systems that guides price at about $10 to $16 and $10 to $13 per square foot respectively. The draw is care: a guide describes Rumber as simply hose out and let dry.

The watch-out is the same as with any overlay: moisture trapped under it, against the trailer bed, can corrode what is below. For WERM, one guide warns to monitor for moisture under the flooring that could corrode the trailer bed.

How to choose

• Budget and repairability: wood. Easy to fix a section at a time.
• Light weight, matching the trailer: aluminum, if you will keep up the mats-out schedule.
• Least care: rubber composite, if the budget allows.

Whatever you pick, the crossmembers under it matter more than the floor. A new floor on rusted crossmembers is money wasted, so we check them first. See trailer floor replacement and horse trailer repair.