Maryland
State law entitles a franchised dealer to warranty and recall reimbursement at the labor rate and parts markup you charge your own retail customers. It also forbids the factory from auditing you simply because you asked. Most Maryland stores are still being paid on an old number anyway.
Md. Code Ann., Transp. § 15-212 · Warranty and recall reimbursement at retail labor rate and parts markup
What you are owed
Retail rate
Maryland ties both labor and parts to what you charge retail customers for nonwarranty repairs of a like kind. That covers recall work as well as warranty.
How often you may file
Once a year
One rate or markup submission per year. A submission that comes back weak holds you at the old number until the next one is allowed.
Recovering the cost
Prohibited
The manufacturer cannot claw the money back by arbitrarily reducing your compensation, or through a separate charge, surcharge or any other burden.
An audit for asking
Prohibited
A request for retail-rate reimbursement is not grounds for a warranty, retail or service audit. The manufacturer cannot open one solely because you filed.
Why It Is Not A Form
Maryland gives you the rate in principle and leaves you to prove it out of your own customer-paid repair orders. The statute decides which of that work belongs in the number and which of it does not, and the line it draws is not the one most stores would guess. That is where Maryland filings come apart.
Maryland removes a long list of categories from the calculation, and some of what other states exclude it quietly lets stay in. Read it the way a neighboring state reads it and you end up either padding the number with work the factory will strike or leaving out work that would have lifted it.
The statute is one layer. Your OEM brings its own view of what counts as qualifying repair work and how a submission has to be presented. Maryland bars methods that are unduly burdensome, but knowing where an OEM requirement crosses that line is not something the statute spells out for you.
Winning the rate is not the end of it. The manufacturer may verify your effective rates once a year and adjust them going forward, so a number that only just held up at filing can drift back down the following year.
Because Maryland permits a single submission per year, a weak one does not merely fail. It costs you the twelve months behind it, settled at the rate you were already unhappy with.
The Part Most Dealers Miss
The worry that stops Maryland stores from filing is rarely the math. It is what the factory does next. Maryland addressed that directly: a manufacturer cannot open a warranty, retail or service audit solely because you requested retail-rate reimbursement, and it cannot recover the cost by trimming your compensation or adding a charge somewhere else.
The statute also requires the manufacturer to apply its policies on this compensation uniformly across its Maryland dealers, and it limits how long a paid claim stays open to chargeback. The protection is already written. What decides the outcome is whether the rate you put in front of them holds together.
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 Md. Code Ann., Transp. § 15-212 as published by the State of Maryland, reviewed July 2026. Statutes change; we re-verify before every filing.