South Dakota
State law says warranty labor may not be paid at less than what you charge your own customers for like work, and warranty parts may not be paid at less than your current retail rate. It is an older, plainer statute than most, which is exactly why so many South Dakota stores have never used it.
SDCL § 32-6B-61 · Warranty parts reimbursement at the retail rate customarily charged
What you are owed
Retail floor
Not less than the rate you charge nonwarranty customers for like service, and not less than your current retail rate on parts. A floor, not a ceiling someone negotiated for you.
What they must rely on
Your schedule
The manufacturer has to rely on your written schedule of labor rates and parts. It cannot make you prove the rate transaction by transaction or bury you in burdensome documentation.
How often you may ask
No set limit
Unlike the newer declared-rate states, South Dakota puts no statutory cap on how often you may request or adjust your warranty labor or parts rate.
Claims clock
30 days
Each warranty claim must be approved or denied within 30 days of receipt, with written notice of any disapproval, and approved claims paid within 30 days after that.
Why It Is Not A Form
South Dakota does not lay out a submission process at all. It states the floor and leaves the rest to the manufacturer's own warranty program, which means the rules that decide what your rate comes out to are the factory's, not the state's. Knowing where the statute ends and the policy begins is where these requests are won or lost.
South Dakota law does not carve any category of work out of the retail floor. Your manufacturer's program does, and it screens out a good deal. Accept its version without question and you have handed the factory the power to set your rate before the request is even read.
Every OEM has its own view of what counts as qualifying repair work and how a rate change has to be presented. Where its policy goes further than the statute allows, the statute wins, but only if someone on your side can tell which parts of the policy the law actually backs.
The anti-burden clause means the factory has to rely on your written schedule. That is a strong position only if the schedule reflects what you actually charge. A number that does not survive a second look invites exactly the line-by-line scrutiny the statute was written to prevent.
The manufacturer may audit a paid claim for a year and charge back what it finds unsubstantiated. A higher rate is only worth having if the claims paid at that rate can stand up for the year that follows.
The Part Most Dealers Miss
The objection most stores raise is the paperwork: the fear that asking for retail rate means proving every repair order to a factory analyst. South Dakota wrote that fear out of the statute. The manufacturer must rely on your written schedule of hourly labor rates and parts, and it may not require transaction by transaction calculations or any other unduly burdensome documentation.
Add a floor that covers labor, parts and diagnostic work, plus no statutory cap on how often you may ask, and the law is about as dealer-friendly as an older statute gets. What decides the result is whether the schedule you put forward is one you can stand behind.
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 SDCL § 32-6B-61 as published by the State of South Dakota, reviewed July 2026. Statutes change; we re-verify before every filing.