Minnesota
Since 2023, Minnesota measures warranty labor against your own retail rate and the labor time guide you use for customer-paid work, with diagnostic time counted in full. Most Minnesota stores are still being paid as if the factory's time guide were the only one that mattered.
Minn. Stat. § 80E.041 · Warranty obligations to dealers; retail rate for parts and labor
What you are owed
Retail rate
Labor at your effective nonwarranty rate on the time guide you use for retail work, plus all diagnostic time, including time on the line with the manufacturer's technical assistance.
The franchisor's clock
30 days
A franchisor that rejects your retail rate submission has 30 days to do it in writing, with reasonable substantiation and a proposed adjustment of its own.
How often you may file
Once a year
A dealer may establish a retail rate for parts or labor no more than once per year. There is no second attempt if the first one is thin.
Denials on a technicality
Prohibited
A claim cannot be denied or reduced solely for a clerical error, an incidental slip in claim processing, or another administrative technicality. You get the chance to correct it.
Why It Is Not A Form
Minnesota gives you a strong entitlement and expects you to prove it out of your own nonwarranty, customer-paid repair orders, screened to the kind of work warranty would have covered. The statute is precise about what comes out of that sample. Getting it right is where the value is, and getting it wrong is where Minnesota filings lose ground.
Minnesota removes a specific set of categories from the calculation and screens what remains to warranty-like repairs. Some of what other states exclude, Minnesota lets count. Read it with another state's habits and the number comes back lower than the law allows.
Minnesota lets the dealer elect the retail-rate method or the default cost-plus method for parts. The right election depends on how your store actually prices, and choosing by default is how a lot of money stays on the table.
A franchisor that disagrees has to come back with substantiation and a counter-number. If what you submitted does not hold together, its counter-number is the one that frames everything that follows.
When a rate dispute does not resolve, Minnesota gives the dealer a civil remedy, but the clock to use it runs 60 days from the proposed adjustment or the end of the internal process, whichever is later. Stores that let it lapse are stuck with the franchisor's number for the year.
What Changed In 2023
For years the real fight in warranty labor was not the rate, it was the hours. A good rate paid against a factory time guide that undercounts the job still underpays you. Minnesota's 2023 amendment moved the measure to the labor time guide you use for your own customer-paid work, and it counts all diagnostic time, including the time your technicians spend on the phone with the manufacturer.
It also protects the claims themselves: a franchisor cannot deny or cut a claim over a clerical error or an administrative technicality without giving you the chance to fix it. The entitlement is strong. What turns it into money is a submission that holds up when the franchisor reads it.
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 Minn. Stat. § 80E.041 as published by the State of Minnesota, reviewed July 2026. Statutes change; we re-verify before every filing.