Hawaii
Hawaii splits the right in two. One section of the licensing law sets warranty labor at the rate you charge your own retail customers. Another sets warranty parts at your retail markup and presumes the markup you declare is fair. Most stores are still being paid on terms that predate both.
Haw. Rev. Stat. § 437-56 · Reimbursement for parts at the dealer's retail markup (labor: § 437-28)
What you are owed
Retail rate
Warranty labor may not be paid at less than the rate you charge your retail customers, and warranty parts markup may not be less than your retail parts markup.
Your declared markup
Presumed fair
The parts markup you submit is presumed fair and reasonable. It is measured against same line-make franchised dealers in the State, not against whatever the factory would prefer to pay.
How often you may file
Once a year
A change to your parts reimbursement markup may be requested no more than once every twelve months. A failed request waits a full year for the next one.
Recovering the cost
Prohibited
The manufacturer may not recover, or even attempt to recover, from you what it costs to reimburse you for warranty parts as the statute requires.
Why It Is Not A Form
Hawaii does not hand you a markup. It requires you to prove one out of your own customer-paid repair orders, under a rule that removes specific categories of work from the calculation. The labor side reads simply. The parts side is where the judgment lives, and it is where filings come back lower than they should.
Labor and parts sit in different parts of Hawaii's law and work differently. A submission that treats them as one filing tends to get one of them wrong, and the factory only needs one weak half to push back on the whole thing.
The statute names categories of work that do not count toward your parts markup, and the list was amended after it was first enacted. Reading it from an old summary leaves in work the current law takes out, and that work drags your markup down before anyone at the factory has looked at it.
The statute is one layer. Your OEM brings its own view of what qualifies and how a claim must be documented. Where the two diverge, the reading that survives is the conservative one, and knowing which applies to your brand is not written in the statute.
Hawaii allows one change to your parts markup every twelve months. A submission that does not hold up costs you that year, settled at the markup you set out to replace.
The Part Most Dealers Miss
Most states set a floor and stop there. Hawaii writes the labor right into the list of conduct that can cost a manufacturer its license: paying warranty labor at less than the rate you charge retail customers is prohibited, and so is paying more. The benchmark is your own retail rate, not a negotiated figure.
On parts, the markup you declare is presumed fair and reasonable, and the manufacturer cannot claw the cost back from you once it pays. When it disapproves a claim it has to tell you why in writing. The law already favors the store that files. What decides the outcome is whether the submission 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.
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 Haw. Rev. Stat. § 437-56 as published by the State of Hawaii, reviewed July 2026. Statutes change; we re-verify before every filing.