Georgia
Georgia law entitles a franchised dealer to be paid at retail rates for warranty parts and labor. Most stores in this state are still being reimbursed at a number they agreed to years ago. Here is what the statute actually says, and what it takes to change it.
O.C.G.A. § 10-1-641 · Warranty and recall compensation at retail rate
The standard
Retail rate
Compensation for warranty parts and labor is judged principally on the retail rates you customarily charge, and on rates charged by similarly situated dealers.
The manufacturer's clock
30 days
They must approve or disapprove within 30 days of your submission. No written disapproval in that window and the rate is deemed approved.
How often you may file
Once a year
No dealer may declare a retail rate for parts or labor more than once in a calendar year. A weak submission costs you twelve months.
Recovering the cost
Prohibited
The manufacturer cannot claw the increase back out of you with a surcharge imposed solely to recover the cost of reimbursing you.
How The Rate Is Set
Not a survey, and not a negotiation. Georgia lets you establish the rate out of your own customer-pay work.
You submit 100 sequential non-warranty customer-paid repair orders containing warranty-like repairs, or 90 consecutive days of customer-paid repair orders, whichever is less, drawn from the previous 180 days. Your rate is total labor sales divided by total hours generated.
The same sample basis. Your markup percentage is total parts sales divided by total parts cost, minus one, times one hundred.
Why the sample decides everything
The word doing the work in that paragraph is warranty-like. Georgia excludes whole categories of work from the calculation, and those categories are the cheapest things you sell. Leave them in and you have averaged your own rate down before the manufacturer has read a word of it.
What Comes Out
Georgia's statute is one of the leaner ones in the country. The categories it removes are these:
Your manufacturer then applies its own rules on top of the state list, and where the two disagree the stricter one governs what belongs in a defensible sample.
The Part Most Dealers Miss
The manufacturer has 30 days from your submission to approve or disapprove in writing. If they do not disapprove in that window, the rate you declared is deemed approved. If they do contest it, they have to reasonably substantiate that your rate is unreasonable compared with similarly situated dealers in a comparable geographic area of Georgia, which is a much harder thing to do than simply saying no.
That clock is why the quality of the submission matters more than the size of the ask. And because Georgia allows only one declaration per calendar year, a sample that does not hold up costs you the twelve months behind it.
Who Does Yours
John Fairchild has run more than 400 warranty reimbursement filings himself. Not a case handed to whoever is free this week, and not a template with your name merged into it. He has seen what a given manufacturer pushes back on and what a clean sample looks like before it goes out.
And because your rate is built out of your own customer-pay pricing, we do not stop at the filing. The platform runs the daily discipline that protects that pricing all year, which is what decides how high you can go next time.
No cost, no obligation. We will tell you the rate you could defend today and whether filing is worth running.
Summary of O.C.G.A. § 10-1-641 as published in the Georgia Code, reviewed July 2026. Statutes change; we re-verify before every filing.