Georgia
State law entitles a franchised dealer to be reimbursed for warranty parts and labor at the rates you actually charge your own customers. Most stores in Georgia are still being paid against a number someone agreed to years ago, and every repair order since has been settled at that number.
O.C.G.A. § 10-1-641 · Warranty and recall compensation at retail rate
What you are owed
Retail rate
Not a negotiated number and not whatever you agreed to years ago. Georgia measures reasonable compensation against the retail rates you customarily charge.
The manufacturer's clock
30 days
They must approve or disapprove in writing within 30 days. If they do not disapprove in that window, the rate you declared is deemed approved.
How often you may file
Once a year
One declaration per calendar year for parts or labor. There is no second attempt in December if the first one fails.
Recovering the cost
Prohibited
The manufacturer cannot claw the increase back with a surcharge imposed solely to recover what it now pays you.
Why It Is Not A Form
Georgia 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 short. The judgment inside it is not, and it is where filings fail.
Georgia removes entire categories of what you sell from the calculation, and they are among the cheapest things on your menu. Leave them in and you have averaged your own rate down before the manufacturer has read a line of it. Most stores that file alone lose here, quietly, and never learn why the number came back low.
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.
A manufacturer that contests your rate has to substantiate that it is unreasonable against comparable dealers in your market. That is a high bar for them, but only if what you submitted holds up under it. Assembling something that does is a different job from running a report.
Because Georgia permits a single declaration per calendar year, a weak submission does not merely fail. It costs you the twelve months behind it, at the rate you were already unhappy with.
The Part Most Dealers Miss
Once a submission lands, the manufacturer has 30 days to approve or disapprove it in writing. If they let that window pass without disapproving, the rate you declared stands. And if they do contest it, the burden is on them to substantiate that your rate is unreasonable compared with similarly situated dealers in a comparable part of Georgia.
The law, in other words, is already on your side. 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 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.
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 O.C.G.A. § 10-1-641 as published in the Georgia Code, reviewed July 2026. Statutes change; we re-verify before every filing.