The Best Roof Racks for a Subaru Forester

Subaru changed the Forester’s published roof figure at the 2010 model year, and because the cars look similar enough across that boundary, owners of older Foresters routinely work to the newer number.

One more trap specific to cars that came with factory crossbars: the bars have their own rating, and it is often lower than the roof’s total published limit. Two numbers apply at once and the smaller one wins. If you are loading to the roof’s figure on factory bars rated below it, the bars are the thing that fails.

Check your trim too. The base trim in some years shipped without crossbars, which is not the same as shipping without rails — you may have rails and simply nothing bridging them.

Foresters from 2014 onward carry conventional raised side rails on most trims: a rail with a visible gap you can pass your hand under. That is the easiest case in the whole rack market. Every major system has a rail-mount fit kit, there is no drilling, and no vehicle-specific fit kit is needed on top of the feet.

Do the test anyway before ordering. Hook a finger under the rail. Gap means raised rails and a raised-rail foot pack. No gap means flush rails and a completely different, non-interchangeable part. No rail at all means a clamp-on foot pack plus a vehicle-specific fit kit. The rail type guide shows all three.

Because rail-mount feet slide, your spread is whatever you set it to within the rails’ usable length. Set it as wide as the rails and the carrier allow — a wider spread is a steadier, quieter load — then measure center-to-center and check it against the box’s stated range. The spread guide covers why too narrow is a real problem and too wide is usually not.

This is the part that costs Forester owners money. There is no factory receiver on most trims, and the aftermarket hitches commonly fitted to a Forester are Class I or II with a 1-1/4 inch opening.

That quietly rules out most hitch cargo carriers and nearly all platform bike racks, which want a 2-inch Class III. People buy the rack first, discover the opening second, and end up either returning it or buying a hitch they did not budget for. Measure your receiver opening before you shop; our hitch classes guide has the class-by-class numbers.

The upside is that it pushes the answer back to the roof, and a Forester’s roof is good. A roof bike rack or a trunk rack is the realistic route for bikes here, and both work well on a car this shape.

The tall rear hatch is the other detail. It opens high, and a short-shank hitch carrier can foul it — check the swing path with the hatch fully up before you trust it, not after.

The flat roof is what makes the Forester a good box car. A box that sits level seals better, loads more evenly and does not drain water into one corner. The long roof means you can run a full-size box without its nose entering the windshield’s field of view, which is a real constraint on shorter crossovers.

Size it against the weight, not the volume. A full-size box empty is already 40-50 lb of a 176 lb allowance before anything goes in it — the sizing guide walks through the arithmetic, and the box roundup ranks the boxes themselves.

Expect a double-digit percentage fuel penalty at highway speed with a box fitted — published testing on cargo boxes consistently finds one, and a boxy car feels it more than a slippery one. Our gas mileage guide covers what the tests actually measured. Take it off between trips.