Warranty Reimbursement

Kansas

Kansas dealers are owed retail rate. Most are not getting it.

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 Kansas are still being paid against a number someone agreed to years ago, and every repair order since has been settled at that number.

Kan. Stat. Ann. § 8-2415 · Correction of warranty defects — compensation to dealer

What you are owed

Retail rate

Not a negotiated number and not whatever you agreed to years ago. Kansas measures compensation against the rates you charge retail customers for like parts and services, provided they are reasonable.

The manufacturer's clock

30 days

A claim not specifically disapproved in writing or by electronic transmission within 30 days of receipt is considered approved.

How often you may file

Once a year

One request to change your average percentage markup or labor rate in any one-year period. There is no second attempt if the first one fails.

If they say no

They justify it

The burden of proof sits with the manufacturer to establish that its denial was reasonable. Declining your number is not the same as defending the decision.

Why It Is Not A Form

The law gives you the right. Proving it is the work.

Kansas 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.

The wrong work is in the numbers

Kansas takes routine maintenance out of the calculation, and that work is among the cheapest things on your menu. Leave it 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 protection against being buried has limits

Kansas bars a manufacturer from imposing an unduly burdensome or time-consuming methodology on you, which tells you exactly what the legislature expected them to try. It does not decide for you what a defensible submission looks like, and a store that answers a burdensome request badly has given up the protection it was handed.

Your manufacturer's rules sit on top of the state's

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, and knowing which is which per manufacturer is not in the statute.

And you get one attempt

Because Kansas permits a single rate request in any one-year period, 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

A denial has to be defended too.

Most dealers assume a rejection ends the conversation. In Kansas it starts one. Let the 30 days pass without a written disapproval and the claim is considered approved, and if they do deny it, the burden of proof is on the manufacturer to establish that the denial itself was reasonable.

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

Over 400 warranty reimbursements, personally.

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.

Get your free Kansas rate analysis

No cost, no obligation. We will tell you the rate you could defend today and whether filing is worth running at all.

Summary of Kan. Stat. Ann. § 8-2415 as published in the Kansas Statutes Annotated, reviewed July 2026. Statutes change; we re-verify before every filing.