Ohio
State law entitles a franchised dealer to be reimbursed for warranty parts and labor at the rates you actually charge your own customers. Most stores in Ohio are still being paid against a number someone agreed to years ago, and every repair order since has been settled at that number.
Ohio Rev. Code § 4517.52 · Warranty/recall reimbursement at retail rate
What you are owed
Retail rate
Not a negotiated number and not whatever you agreed to years ago. Ohio measures compensation against the rates you charge retail customers for warranty-like diagnosis, labor and parts.
The franchisor's clock
30 days
They have 30 days from receiving your notice to contest the rate. If they do not contest it in that window, the rate you submitted takes effect.
How often you may file
Once a year
One establishment or modification of your labor rate or parts markup per calendar year. There is no second attempt in December if the first one fails.
Recovering the cost
Prohibited
The franchisor cannot assess penalties or surcharges, shift the cost back onto you by another route, or take retaliatory action because you asked.
Why It Is Not A Form
Ohio does not hand you a rate. It requires you to prove one out of your own customer-pay repair orders, under rules that decide which of that 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.
The statute removes a long list of categories from the calculation, and they are among the cheapest things on your menu. That list is long enough that no two people read it the same way on the first pass. Leave the wrong work in and you have averaged your own rate down before the franchisor has read a line of it.
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.
Thirty days is not long, and a franchisor that intends to contest your rate has usually decided that inside the first week. What it contests is whatever in your submission does not hold together. Assembling something that does is a different job from running a report.
Because Ohio permits a single establishment or modification per calendar year, a weak submission does not merely fail. It costs you the twelve months behind it, at the rate you were already unhappy with.
The Part Most Dealers Miss
The reason most Ohio stores never file is not that they doubt they are owed the money. It is the quiet worry about what the factory does afterward. Ohio wrote that worry out of the statute: the franchisor cannot assess a penalty or surcharge, cannot shift the cost back onto you by another route, and cannot take retaliatory action because you exercised the right.
And if they do not contest your rate inside 30 days, it takes effect. 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 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 Ohio Rev. Code § 4517.52 as published in the Ohio Revised Code, reviewed July 2026. Statutes change; we re-verify before every filing.