Indiana
Indiana lets a franchised dealer declare its own average labor rate and parts markup from its customer-paid work. The manufacturer's only recourse is a written rebuttal inside 60 days. Without one, your rate is deemed reasonable and applies automatically. Most Indiana stores have never put a declaration in front of them.
Ind. Code § 9-32-13-15.5 · Compensation for warranty services at the dealer's retail rates
What you are owed
Retail rate
Warranty labor and parts at the rates your retail customers pay for comparable repairs, judged against similarly situated repair facilities in Indiana.
The manufacturer's clock
60 days
They have 60 days from receipt to rebut your declaration in writing. If they do not, the rate is deemed reasonable and takes effect on its own.
How often you may file
Once a year
One declaration of your labor rate or parts markup in any twelve-month period. There is no quick second try if the first one is rebutted.
Recovering the cost
Prohibited
The manufacturer cannot impose a surcharge on you to recover what it costs to reimburse you at retail for parts or labor.
Why It Is Not A Form
Indiana does not give you a rate. It requires you to prove one from your own customer-paid repair orders, after setting aside work the statute says does not count. The 60-day rule only helps a declaration that survives being read closely, and building one that does is the part that takes judgment.
Indiana removes ten categories of work from the calculation, and some are easy to miss because they look like ordinary customer-pay. Each one left in quietly lowers the rate you declare, and the manufacturer has no reason to point that out.
Your OEM applies its own reading of qualifying work and its own documentation demands. Where those differ from the statute, the conservative reading usually survives, and which reading applies to your brand is not something the statute settles.
Sixty days is enough time for a manufacturer to find whatever in your submission does not hold together. A rebuttal resets the conversation on their terms. A declaration with nothing to rebut is a different piece of work from a report export.
Indiana allows one declaration a year. If yours is rebutted, the cost is not just the filing. It is a year of warranty settled at the rate you meant to replace.
The Part Most Dealers Miss
Indiana measures reasonableness against similarly situated repair facilities in the state, and the law expressly refuses to set one statewide hourly warranty rate. A manufacturer cannot hold your store to a regional figure. The benchmark starts with what your own retail customers pay.
And the timing is on your side. The manufacturer has 60 days to rebut in writing, after which the rate you declared is deemed reasonable and takes effect automatically, with no surcharge allowed to win it back. The law already does the heavy lifting. What decides the outcome is a declaration that 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 Ind. Code § 9-32-13-15.5 as published by the State of Indiana, reviewed July 2026. Statutes change; we re-verify before every filing.