Michigan
State law entitles a franchised dealer to be reimbursed for warranty parts and labor at rates measured against what comparable stores carrying your line-make actually charge. Most stores in Michigan are still being paid against a number someone agreed to years ago, and every repair order since has been settled at that number.
Mich. Comp. Laws § 445.1577a · Reasonable compensation for parts reimbursement and labor rates
What you are owed
Retail rate
Not a negotiated number and not whatever you agreed to years ago. Michigan measures your rate against the retail parts prices and labor rates of comparable dealers carrying your line-make.
The manufacturer's clock
45 days
They have 45 days from your submission to approve or disapprove the declared rate. Longer than nearly every state we file in, and it runs whether or not anyone is working on it.
When the money changes
30 days later
An approved rate takes effect 30 days after approval, not on the day they say yes. The gap between filing and the first dollar is longer than most stores plan for.
To contest it
In writing
A manufacturer that disagrees has to reasonably substantiate that your rate is inaccurate, incomplete or unreasonable, and put its reasons in writing.
Why It Is Not A Form
Michigan does not hand you a rate. It requires you to declare one out of your own customer-pay repair orders and hold it up against a specific set of comparable stores, under rules that decide which of your 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.
Michigan lets a manufacturer contest your rate as inaccurate, as incomplete, or as unreasonable. Stores prepare for the third and get caught by the second. Incomplete is not a judgment about your pricing at all, it is a judgment about your paperwork, and it is the one that ends most filings a store runs on its own.
Your rate is weighed against similarly situated dealers in a comparable geographic area of Michigan that carry the same line-make. The import store two blocks away is not the yardstick, and neither is the same brand in a market twice the size. Which stores actually count is a narrower question than it sounds, and it decides the number.
Michigan judges what you customarily charge for real repair work, 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.
The Part Most Dealers Miss
Michigan runs two clocks back to back. The manufacturer has 45 days to approve or disapprove what you declared, and an approved rate then takes effect 30 days after that. Every repair order written in the meantime is still settled at the old number, and a store that files in the autumn has spent most of the year being paid a rate it had already proven it should not be paid.
What you get in exchange is a real standard: they cannot simply decline. They have to substantiate that your rate is inaccurate, incomplete or unreasonable, in writing. The law 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 Mich. Comp. Laws § 445.1577a as published in the Michigan Compiled Laws, reviewed July 2026. Statutes change; we re-verify before every filing.