South Carolina
State law entitles a franchised dealer to warranty compensation at the rates it charges its own customers, bars the manufacturer from recovering that cost, and puts a hard limit on how long it can reopen a claim it already paid. Most stores here are still being paid against a number someone agreed to years ago.
S.C. Code Ann. § 56-15-60 · Fulfillment of warranty agreements — dealer compensation at retail rate
What you are owed
Retail rate
Reasonable compensation may not be less than what you charge for like services to your own nonwarranty customers, once you have made the request. Diagnostic time counts as compensable work.
Recovering the cost
Prohibited
It is unlawful for a manufacturer to recover any portion of its cost of compensating you for recall or warranty work, whether by reducing what it owes you or through a separate charge or surcharge.
How long they can look back
One year
Claims may be audited for up to a year after payment, and charged back only where the work was false, fraudulent, unnecessary or not properly performed. Incentive money is protected on the same terms.
How often you may file
Once a year
You may not request a change in your average percentage markup or your labor rate more than once in any twelve-month period.
Why It Is Not A Form
South Carolina does not hand you a rate. It requires you to prove one out of your own customer-pay repair orders, and because its exclusion list is shorter than most, the expensive mistake here is usually giving away work nobody asked you to give away.
South Carolina's carve-out list is shorter than most, and several categories dealers reflexively pull out of a submission are simply not on it. Every one of those left out by habit lowers the average you are about to submit, and nothing in the process will tell you it happened. This is the most common way a South Carolina filing comes back lower than it should have.
Wholesale work comes out, and so does government and insurance work where volume discounts were negotiated. Ordinary discounting is a different question with a different answer, and treating the two the same, in either direction, is how a submission becomes either understated or vulnerable.
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.
Because South Carolina permits one change in any twelve-month period, a weak submission does not merely fail. It costs you the year behind it, at the rate you were already unhappy with.
The Part Most Dealers Miss
The quiet fear about winning a higher rate is that it comes back later as an audit finding or a chargeback. South Carolina narrows that considerably. A manufacturer may audit warranty claims for up to a year after payment, and may charge back only where a claim was false or fraudulent, or the work was unnecessary or not properly performed. Sales and service incentive money is protected on the same terms rather than being freely reversible.
On top of that it is simply unlawful for a manufacturer to recover what it pays you, by reducing what it otherwise owes or by inventing a surcharge. 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 work out which of your discounted work the statute actually reaches. 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 S.C. Code Ann. § 56-15-60 as published in the South Carolina Code of Laws, reviewed July 2026. Statutes change; we re-verify before every filing.