Illinois
The 2022 rewrite of the Motor Vehicle Franchise Act did more than tie warranty labor and parts to your retail pricing. It protects the labor time you are paid for, and it reaches recalls and stop-sale repairs too. Plenty of Illinois stores filed for a rate and left the rest of the law on the table.
815 ILCS 710/6 · Motor Vehicle Franchise Act; warranty compensation at retail
What you are owed
Retail rate
The same effective labor rate you earn on customer-paid work, and your average parts markup, on warranty repairs, recalls and voluntary stop-sale repairs alike.
Claim decisions
30 days
A warranty claim must be approved or disapproved in writing, with a reason, within 30 days. If it is not, it is deemed approved.
How often you may file
Parts twice, labor once
Your parts markup may change up to twice in a calendar year. Your labor rate may increase once per calendar year, so the labor filing has no second chance.
Recovering the cost
Prohibited
No cost-recovery fee, no surcharge, and no other charge to make you pay for what complying with the retail-rate law costs the manufacturer.
Why It Is Not A Form
Illinois does not hand you a rate. It requires you to prove one from your own customer-paid repair orders, after removing work the statute says does not belong. On top of that it adds rules most states do not have, for labor time and for the biggest parts on the ticket. Each is a place a filing can leave money behind.
The statute takes a category of high-volume, low-dollar work out of both the labor and the parts calculation. Every line of it left in pulls your effective rate down toward the cheapest work on your menu.
Illinois handles whole engine and transmission assemblies, including electric vehicle batteries, under a separate rule from the rest of your parts. Folding them into the ordinary markup gets both numbers wrong.
Illinois has a specific labor-time protection for repairs where no time guide was agreed. A store that only files for a rate is still being paid short hours on every one of those repairs, and the statute's protection does nothing for it unless someone claims it.
The parts markup can move twice in a year. The labor rate cannot. A labor submission that does not hold together costs you the calendar year behind it.
The Part Most Dealers Miss
Warranty pay is a rate multiplied by time. Most retail-rate laws only touch the rate. Illinois goes further: where no time guide has been agreed for a repair, the statute sets the time standard instead of leaving it to the manufacturer. It also extends retail-rate compensation to recalls and voluntary stop-sale repairs, which the manufacturer cannot carve out.
And the manufacturer cannot charge you for any of it. No cost-recovery fee, no surcharge, no other charge to make up what the law requires it to pay. What decides the outcome is whether your submission claims all of it.
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 815 ILCS 710/6 as published by the State of Illinois, reviewed July 2026. Statutes change; we re-verify before every filing.