Iowa
Iowa entitles a franchised dealer to warranty parts, labor and diagnostics at retail, proven from its own customer-paid work. The franchiser has 30 days to approve or deny, and if it denies, it is the franchiser that has to prove its case on appeal. An attempt to rewrite the law in 2026 failed, so the right stands as written.
Iowa Code § 322A.5 · Warranties and recalls; compensation at retail rate
What you are owed
Retail rate
Compensation for warranty parts, labor and diagnostics not less than what you charge retail customers for like work, with diagnostic time allowances that must be reasonable and adequate.
The franchiser's clock
30 days
They have 30 days to audit your submission and approve or deny it. A denial can be appealed to the state, and the franchiser bears the burden of proof.
How often you may file
Once a year
One change to your parts markup or labor rate in any one-year period. A submission that is denied does not get a quick do-over.
Claims after a year
Protected
Once twelve months have passed since a warranty claim was submitted, the manufacturer cannot reduce or disallow it unless an Iowa court finds it was fraudulent.
Why It Is Not A Form
Iowa does not hand you a rate. It requires you to prove one out of your own customer-paid repair orders, and it bars the franchiser from demanding an unduly burdensome way of doing it. The rule is cleaner than most states'. That makes the quality of what you submit, rather than the rule, the thing that decides the result.
Iowa's exclusion is one of the narrowest in the country. Stores working from another state's playbook, or from a vendor template, strip out work Iowa never excluded, and lower their own number in the process.
Franchisers bring their own portals and their own filters. Iowa bars them from requiring part-by-part or transaction-by-transaction calculations, but knowing where a franchiser's process stops being permitted and starts being burdensome is not in the statute.
Thirty days is the franchiser's audit window, and it will use it. Whatever in your submission does not hold together is what a denial is built on. A submission that does hold together is a different job from running a report.
Because Iowa permits a single change in any one-year period, a denied submission costs you a year of warranty paid at the rate you were trying to move past.
The Part Most Dealers Miss
The reason most Iowa stores never file is the assumption that a franchiser denial ends the conversation. It does not. A denial can be appealed to the Iowa Department of Inspections, Appeals and Licensing, and on that appeal it is the franchiser, not you, that bears the burden of proof.
Iowa also keeps one of the shortest lists of excluded work of any retail-rate state, so more of your real customer-paid repair work counts toward your rate. The law already leans your way. What decides the outcome is whether your submission gives the franchiser nothing to prove.
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 Iowa Code § 322A.5 as published by the State of Iowa, reviewed July 2026. Statutes change; we re-verify before every filing.