Florida
State law entitles a franchised dealer to warranty compensation built from its own retail pricing, and it lets you claim the most favourable of several measures rather than the first one that comes to hand. Most stores in Florida are still being paid against a number someone agreed to years ago.
Fla. Stat. § 320.696 · Warranty responsibility — retail-rate parts and labor compensation
What you are owed
The best of several
Florida does not settle on one measure of your retail pricing. On both parts and labor it lets you claim the most favourable of several, which means the number you can defend is usually higher than the first one you would calculate.
How often you may file
Twice a year
Florida permits a written request semiannually. Every other state we file in allows one attempt a year, so a Florida store that files well has a second chance nobody else gets.
Recovering the cost
Prohibited
The manufacturer may not recover its cost of compensating you, directly or indirectly. No surcharge, no price increase, no quiet pass-through to take the raise back.
Getting paid
30 days
A claim not paid within 30 days of receipt is untimely. They must also apply the rate uniformly to all your warranty work rather than case by case.
Why It Is Not A Form
Florida does not hand you a rate. It requires you to prove one out of your own customer-pay repair orders, under rules that decide which of that work counts and which of it quietly drags your average down. The statute is generous. The judgment inside it is where filings fail.
The right to claim the most favourable measure is only worth something if you work out which one that is before you submit. They are not interchangeable and they do not produce similar numbers. A store that computes the obvious one, submits it, and gets approved has left the difference on the table for the next six months and has no way to see what it missed.
The exclusion list here is long, and it is enumerated separately for parts and for labor, so work that stays in on one side comes out on the other. Several of the excluded categories are among the highest-volume things your drive writes. Leave them in and you have averaged your own rate down before the manufacturer has read a line of it.
The statute is one layer. Your OEM applies its own view of what counts as qualifying repair labor and which of its brands a filing has to prove the rate against. Where the two disagree, the conservative reading is the one that survives. Knowing which is which, per manufacturer, is not in the statute.
Twice a year sounds forgiving until you have used one. A weak submission still costs you the months behind it at the rate you were already unhappy with, and it tells the manufacturer exactly what you are going to argue the next time.
The Part Most Dealers Miss
Florida closes the door most dealers quietly worry about. A manufacturer may not recover its cost of compensating you, directly or indirectly, which rules out a surcharge, a price increase, or any other route to taking the increase back once you have won it. It also may not revisit the rate it has determined except at your request or on a schedule set in advance, and it has to apply that rate uniformly to all your warranty work.
Combined with a second bite in the same year, Florida is one of the better states in the country to be a franchised dealer asking for what you are owed. What decides the outcome is whether what you put in front of them holds up.
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 work out which measure of your pricing Florida will let you claim. We build the submission, you review it before it goes anywhere, and it goes out under a rate we are prepared to defend.
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 Fla. Stat. § 320.696 as published in the Florida Statutes, reviewed July 2026. Statutes change; we re-verify before every filing.