California
California requires a franchisor to pay warranty parts and labor at rates equal to the dealer's own retail labor rate and retail parts rate. It is one of the most detailed retail-rate statutes in the country, and the detail cuts both ways: more protection for the dealer, and more places for a filing to come apart.
Cal. Veh. Code § 3065.2 · Retail labor rate and retail parts rate; qualifying repair orders
What you are owed
Equal to retail
Warranty parts and labor are paid at rates equal to your retail labor rate and retail parts rate. The statute even protects your markup on parts the factory supplies at reduced cost.
The franchisor's clock
30 days
The franchisor has 30 days to contest your submission. If it does not, your rate takes effect on the 30th day.
How often you may file
Once a year
A dealer may establish or modify its retail labor rate and parts rate no more than once per calendar year. There is no second try in the same year.
Recovering the cost
Prohibited
No penalties or surcharges, no shifting costs to you, no limiting your vehicle or parts allocation, no raised prices or fees in response to your filing.
Why It Is Not A Form
California does not leave the qualifying work to interpretation. It writes it out, at length, along with what makes a repair order eligible at all. That precision is what makes the statute strong, and it is also why a California submission is reviewed line by line against a definition most stores have never read in full.
California removes a long, specific list of work from the calculation, some of it categories most dealers would never think to strip out. Each one you miss changes the average, and the franchisor's reviewer knows the list as well as anyone.
The statute defines what a qualifying repair order is before it ever reaches the math. A submission built on repair orders that do not meet that definition can be contested on that basis alone.
Disputes go to the New Motor Vehicle Board, where the franchisor carries the burden of proof. That favors the dealer, but only when the submission was built to be defended in a formal setting from the start.
A rate that is contested successfully, or one that was simply set too low, stays in place until the next calendar year. Every warranty repair order in between is paid at that number.
The Part Most Dealers Miss
The quiet fear behind most unfiled California submissions is not the paperwork. It is what happens to your allocation, your pricing or your fees afterward. California addresses that directly: a franchisor may not recover its warranty costs through penalties or surcharges, by shifting costs to you, by limiting parts or vehicle allocation, or by raising prices, fees or charges in response to your rate submission.
It also cannot impose an across-the-board percentage reduction, and in a protest before the New Motor Vehicle Board, the burden of proof is on the franchisor. If it does not contest within 30 days, your rate takes effect. The law is about as clear as these statutes get. The outcome still depends on what you submit.
We Do This For You
John Fairchild has run more than 400 warranty reimbursement filings himself. You do not pull the repair orders, decide what qualifies, or argue the categories. We build the submission, you review it before it goes anywhere, and it goes out under a rate we are prepared to defend.
Most filings come back in 45 to 60 days. That depends heavily on the manufacturer, and on whether they ask for additional repair orders before they answer, which every statute allows them to do.
And because your rate is proven out of your own customer-pay pricing, we do not stop when the letter is sent. The platform runs the daily discipline that protects that pricing all year, which is what decides how high you can go the next time you are allowed to ask.
No cost, no obligation. We will tell you the rate you could defend today and whether filing is worth running at all.
Summary of Cal. Veh. Code § 3065.2 as published by the State of California, reviewed July 2026. Statutes change; we re-verify before every filing.