Kentucky
State law entitles a franchised dealer to be reimbursed for warranty parts and labor at the amounts you actually charge your own customers, and never below dealer cost plus thirty percent. The trouble is that a minimum is easy to mistake for the answer, and most stores in Kentucky have never tested how far above it they could be.
Ky. Rev. Stat. § 190.046 · Warranty and recall reimbursement at retail rate
What you are owed
Retail rate
Not a negotiated number and not whatever you agreed to years ago. Kentucky measures compensation against the amounts you charge your own customers for like services and parts.
The floor under parts
Cost + 30%
Parts compensation may never fall below dealer cost plus thirty percent gross profit. That is the statutory minimum, not the target.
The manufacturer's clock
30 days
Claims must be approved or disapproved within 30 days. Anything not specifically disapproved in writing in that window is considered approved, and payment follows.
What counts as compensation
More than labor
Reasonable compensation expressly includes diagnosing the defect, repair service, labor, parts, and your administrative and clerical costs.
Why It Is Not A Form
Kentucky does not hand you a rate. It sets a minimum and then requires you to prove anything above it out of your own customer-pay repair orders. The statute is short. The judgment inside it is not, and it is the difference between the floor and what you are actually owed.
Cost plus thirty is the number a manufacturer may not go below. It is not the number you are owed. A great many Kentucky stores are being paid at or near that floor, have been for years, and read their statements as evidence that the law is being followed. It is, and they are still being underpaid against what they actually charge.
Kentucky measures what you charge for like services and parts, which means the cheapest and most heavily discounted things on your menu can quietly drag your average down before the manufacturer has read a line of it. Most stores that file alone lose here, and never learn why the number came back low.
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.
Kentucky weighs your rate against the prevailing amounts charged by dealers in the city or community where you do business, and against what other manufacturers pay their dealers for the same work. Both cut in your favour more often than stores expect, but only if the submission is built knowing that is the comparison being made.
The Part Most Dealers Miss
Cost plus thirty percent is the line a manufacturer may not pay beneath. Above it, the standard is what you charge your own customers, and the manufacturer may not demand unreasonable proof to establish it. Once a claim is in, they have 30 days to disapprove it in writing, and anything they do not disapprove in that window is considered approved.
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
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 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 Ky. Rev. Stat. § 190.046 as published in the Kentucky Revised Statutes, reviewed July 2026. Statutes change; we re-verify before every filing.