Virginia
Virginia entitles a franchised dealer to be compensated for warranty and recall parts and labor at retail, including diagnostic time. The statute was amended again effective July 1, 2025, and most stores are still being paid on a rate set long before it.
Va. Code Ann. § 46.2-1571 · Recall, warranty, maintenance and sales incentive obligations
What you are owed
Retail rate
Warranty and recall parts and labor at retail, with diagnostic work paid too, including a technician's time on the line with the manufacturer's technical assistance.
The claims clock
30 days
Each warranty claim must be paid within 30 days of submission, or rejected in writing with the reasons stated. A claim cannot simply sit.
A contested chargeback
Stayed
You may petition the Commissioner to contest a chargeback, and collection is stayed until the hearing. The manufacturer cannot take the money first and argue later.
Recovering the cost
Prohibited
No reduced compensation, surcharge or other imposition to recover the cost of warranty and recall work, and no passing the manufacturer's legal costs back to you.
Why It Is Not A Form
Virginia does not tie you to a declaration you can make once a year. It lets you request an increase in writing, and leaves the dispute over what is reasonable to the evidence you bring. That makes the quality of the request everything, because the statute will not hand you a rate the numbers do not support.
Virginia defines several kinds of work out of what counts as retail, and one of them catches a large share of what many service drives sell. Leave it in and the rate you request is lower than the rate you are owed, before anyone at the factory has looked at it.
Your OEM applies its own warranty policy and its own view of which work counts. Where it conflicts with the statute, Virginia law controls, but finding the conflict means knowing both documents for your brand, not just one.
Virginia expects the parts markup to be agreed as a reasonable approximation of your retail markup, with a statutory fallback if the two sides cannot agree. Walking into that conversation without the fallback worked out is how stores settle for less.
The statute does not limit how often you may request an increase. Every request that falls short still costs you the months you were paid at the old rate while it was argued.
The Part Most Dealers Miss
Virginia gives recall work its own protection: recall parts are priced under a statutory high-water rule rather than whatever the part happens to cost on the day, and rental vehicles provided to customers have to be reimbursed in full. The manufacturer cannot recover any of it through reduced payments or surcharges.
And if the factory comes back with a chargeback, it cannot collect until a set period after final notice, and a timely petition to the Commissioner stays collection until the hearing. The law is already leaning your way. What decides the outcome is whether your request 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.
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 Va. Code Ann. § 46.2-1571 as published by the State of Virginia, reviewed July 2026. Statutes change; we re-verify before every filing.