Tennessee
State law says a manufacturer may not pay you an hourly warranty labor rate below what you charge your own customers for similar repairs. Most stores in Tennessee are still being settled against a number someone agreed to years ago, and every warranty repair order since has been paid at that number.
Tenn. Code § 55-17-121 · Warranty labor compensation at retail rate
What you are owed
Retail rate
Tennessee sets a floor, not a negotiation. In no event may a manufacturer pay you an hourly warranty labor rate below the retail labor rate you charge for similar repairs.
Their window to answer
30 days
They must approve or deny your request in writing within 30 days of receiving it. An approved parts markup then takes effect 45 days after that, so the calendar matters as much as the answer.
Parts markup changes
Once a year
You may not request a change in your average percentage markup more than once in any one-year period. Your labor rate is not capped the same way, though a change in it has to reach the commission within 10 days.
If they push back
Their burden
It is not on you to prove your rate is fair. To pay you less, the manufacturer has to show the commission your retail rate is improper in light of all economic circumstances.
Why It Is Not A Form
Tennessee 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.
Dealers who have read about other states arrive expecting that a manufacturer who misses the deadline has approved the rate by default. Tennessee does not work that way. The 30-day duty to answer in writing is real, but nothing in the statute converts their silence into your approved rate. A filing here has to win on what is in it, not on a clock running out.
Tennessee excludes less than almost any state in the country. Routine maintenance, tire service and oil service among it, is the only category the statute strips out, which means work other states remove from your sample stays in and counts for you here. The catch is the wording: the statute says routine maintenance "such as" tire and oil service, so where routine maintenance ends and a real repair begins is a judgment, not a lookup. Get that line wrong in either direction and you have either averaged your own rate down or handed the manufacturer a reason to reject the sample.
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 the manufacturer's route to paying you less runs through the commission, a Tennessee filing is built to be examined by someone other than the person receiving it. That is an advantage, but only where the submission was assembled to survive it. It is a different job from running a report.
The Part Most Dealers Miss
Tennessee anticipated the quiet way these requests get killed. A manufacturer may not make you establish your markup through a methodology, or by demanding information, that is unduly burdensome or time-consuming, and the statute names the worst offender outright: they cannot require you to build it part by part or transaction by transaction.
The burden runs the same direction on the answer itself. If they deny you, it is on the manufacturer to establish that the denial was reasonable, and to pay you below your retail labor rate they have to show the commission that your rate is improper in light of all economic circumstances. 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, Tennessee stores among them. 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 Tenn. Code § 55-17-121 as published in the Tennessee Code, reviewed July 2026. Statutes change; we re-verify before every filing.