North Carolina
State law entitles a franchised dealer to warranty compensation at its own retail rates, presumes the rate you declare is accurate, and puts the manufacturer on a clock to rebut it. Most stores in North Carolina are still being paid against a number someone agreed to years ago.
N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-305.1 · Warranty/recall compensation at retail rate; no manufacturer cost recovery
What you are owed
Retail rate
Compensation for warranty labor and parts may not be less than what you charge retail customers for nonwarranty work of like kind. You establish it from your own repair orders.
Your declared rate
Presumed accurate
You do not arrive having to prove yourself. The rate you declare is presumed accurate, and it is on the manufacturer to rebut it inside a fixed window.
How often you may ask
No annual cap
North Carolina sets no express statutory limit on how often you may submit or request an adjustment. Almost every other state allows one attempt a year.
Recovering the cost
Prohibited
It is unlawful for a manufacturer to recover any part of what it pays you, whether by reducing what it otherwise owes or through a separate charge, surcharge or price increase.
Why It Is Not A Form
North Carolina does not hand you a rate. It requires you to prove one out of your own customer-pay repair orders, under an exclusion list that is precise enough to punish carelessness in either direction. The statute is favourable. The judgment inside it is where filings fail.
North Carolina enumerates exactly what comes out of the calculation, and the list is closed. That cuts both ways. Strip out more than the statute requires and you have averaged your own rate down for no reason; leave in something the statute names and you have handed the manufacturer a clean reason to rebut the whole submission.
Fluids, filters, alignments, flushes, oil changes, belts and brake friction come out of the sample when they are sold on their own, but they count when they were performed in the course of a covered repair. That single distinction moves a meaningful share of a store's work in or out, and it is a judgment about what actually happened on the repair order rather than a category you can sort by op code.
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. Knowing which is which, per manufacturer, is not in the statute.
Being presumed accurate is worth a great deal right up until the manufacturer rebuts inside its window, and a submission assembled loosely is exactly what gives them the grounds. The presumption rewards a filing that was built to be examined. It does not rescue one that was not.
The Part Most Dealers Miss
Almost every state in the country allows a dealer to declare a rate once in a calendar year, which is why a weak filing is so expensive elsewhere. North Carolina sets no express statutory limit on how often you may submit or request an adjustment. If your customer-pay pricing moves, the law does not make you wait out the year before your warranty rate can follow it.
And what you win, you keep. It is unlawful for a manufacturer to recover any portion of what it pays you, by reducing what it otherwise owes or through a separate surcharge or price increase. Their audits of your claims are limited too, absent cause.
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 where maintenance ends and a covered repair begins. 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 in North Carolina matters more than anywhere else: your rate can follow your pricing whenever you are ready to show it.
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.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-305.1 as published in the North Carolina General Statutes, reviewed July 2026. Statutes change; we re-verify before every filing.