Mississippi
Since 2021, Mississippi law has required manufacturers to reimburse warranty parts and labor at no less than the rates you charge your own retail customers. Your submitted rate is presumed reasonable, and the manufacturer gets a single chance to rebut it. Most stores in the state have not used that yet.
Miss. Code Ann. § 63-17-86 · Establishment of retail rate for parts and labor (parity floor: § 63-17-85)
What you are owed
Retail rate
A floor, not a ceiling. The manufacturer may not pay a warranty labor rate or parts markup lower than what you charge retail customers.
The manufacturer's clock
45 days
Your submitted rate is presumed reasonable and takes effect 45 days after the manufacturer receives it, unless it is rebutted first.
How often you may file
Once a year
You may establish or reset your labor rate or parts markup no more than once in a twelve-month period.
Recovering the cost
Prohibited
No surcharge, recovery fee, price increase or similar mechanism aimed at clawing back what the retail rate now costs the manufacturer.
Why It Is Not A Form
Mississippi does not hand you a rate. It requires you to prove one out of closed customer-pay repair orders, under rules that decide which repairs qualify and which do not. The statute is specific and it is strict, and most of the value in a Mississippi filing is decided before the manufacturer sees it.
Mississippi removes a long list of work from the calculation, including categories that several neighboring states let count, and some exclusions apply only in certain circumstances. Treat it like a simpler statute and you either inflate the rate with work the manufacturer will strike or leave out work that should have been in.
The statute is one layer. Your OEM brings its own view of what counts as a qualifying repair and how a submission must be presented. Where they differ, the reading that survives is the one you can defend under both.
The manufacturer only gets one rebuttal, so it puts everything into it. Whatever in your submission does not hold together becomes the basis for rejecting the rate, and from there the question moves to the Mississippi Motor Vehicle Commission.
Because Mississippi permits a single establishment or reset per twelve months, a weak submission does not merely fail. It costs you the year behind it at the rate you were trying to replace.
The Part Most Dealers Miss
Without a limit, a manufacturer can keep coming back with new objections until the dealer gives up. Mississippi closed that door. The manufacturer is limited to a single rebuttal of your submission, and once it is made it may not add to, expand, supplement or otherwise modify it. If it rejects your rate, you can protest to the Mississippi Motor Vehicle Commission.
Pair that with the presumption of reasonableness and the ban on recovering the cost through surcharges or price increases, and the statute is firmly on the dealer's side. What decides the outcome is whether your submission is built so that their one shot misses.
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 Miss. Code Ann. § 63-17-86 as published by the State of Mississippi, reviewed July 2026. Statutes change; we re-verify before every filing.