New Jersey
Since April 2026 a franchised dealer in New Jersey is entitled to a retail labor time allowance on top of the retail labor rate. It is the first law of its kind in the country. Months in, most stores in the state are still being paid exactly what they were paid in March.
N.J.S.A. 56:10-15 · Motor Vehicle Open Recall Notice and Fair Compensation Act, P.L. 2025 c.140
What you are owed
Retail rate
Not a negotiated number and not whatever you agreed to years ago. New Jersey measures warranty parts and labor against the prevailing retail prices you charge your own customers.
And since April 2026
Retail time
A retail labor time allowance now sits on top of the rate. New Jersey is the first state in the country to compensate the time a repair takes rather than only the price of an hour.
How often you may file
Twice a year
No more than two requests to change your rate, markup or time allowance in one calendar year, with a declared change taking effect 30 days later.
Recovering the cost
Prohibited
The franchisor may not recoup what it now owes you, expressly including through a surcharge or a rise in the wholesale price of vehicles. Ordinary across-the-board pricing is still theirs.
Why It Is Not A Form
New Jersey does not hand you a rate, and it does not hand you a time allowance either. Both have to be proven out of your own customer-pay repair orders, under rules the 2025 act rewrote. The statute is short. The judgment inside it is not, and it is where filings fail.
The most common thing we hear from New Jersey stores this year is that the new law has not changed their cheque. It has not, and it will not on its own. The allowance is a right you have to establish, on your own evidence, the same way the rate always was. A store waiting for the factory to apply it is waiting for something that does not happen.
New Jersey wrote real protection into the chargeback process: written notice with the specific basis, the burden on the franchisor to prove its case, no chargebacks for clerical mistakes, and a limited look-back. Every one of those protections assumes you can answer what is put to you. A store that cannot substantiate its own submission on request has protection it is unable to use.
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 same act that gave you the time allowance also rewrote and lengthened the list of work that cannot be used to prove any of your numbers. Stores reading the new law as purely good news are building submissions on a definition that changed underneath them, and the parts of it that changed are not the parts anyone is talking about.
The Part Most Dealers Miss
For as long as anyone in this business can remember, warranty work has paid whatever the manufacturer's guide said the job should take, and your technicians have absorbed the difference when it took longer. Every other state in the country still works that way. New Jersey decided that gap belongs to the manufacturer, and since April 2026 a dealer here can be compensated for repair time and not only for the price of an hour.
It is the first law of its kind in the United States, and it is worth real money to a store that claims it properly. 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 numbers 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 N.J.S.A. 56:10-15 as amended by the Motor Vehicle Open Recall Notice and Fair Compensation Act, P.L. 2025 c.140, effective April 1 2026. Reviewed July 2026. Statutes change; we re-verify before every filing.