Wisconsin
State law entitles a franchised dealer to warranty labor at the effective rate you charge your own customers, and to parts at your own cost and markup. Most stores in Wisconsin are still being paid against a number someone agreed to years ago, and every repair order since has been settled at that number.
Wis. Stat. § 218.0125 · Warranty/recall reimbursement at retail rate
What you are owed
Your own rate
Warranty labor is compensated at your effective nonwarranty labor rate, and parts at your own cost plus your average markup. Not a negotiated number, and not whatever you agreed to years ago.
How labor is figured
Rate × hours
Warranty labor is your effective nonwarranty rate multiplied by the hours the manufacturer's time allowances provide for the repair.
The manufacturer's window
30 days
A claim not specifically disapproved in writing or by electronic transmission within 30 days is considered approved, and payment is due within 30 days after that.
What does not count
Routine work
Routine maintenance is not a qualifying nonwarranty repair, so it cannot help prove your rate. Left in, it does the opposite.
Why It Is Not A Form
Wisconsin 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.
A rate established today does nothing for the work already written at the old one. Every month a store spends deciding whether to file is a month settled at a number it has already concluded is too low, and none of it comes back.
Routine maintenance does not qualify to prove your rate, and it is among the cheapest things on your menu. Leave it in and you have averaged your own rate down before the manufacturer has read a line of it. Most stores that file alone lose here, quietly, and never learn why the number came back low.
Wisconsin does not hand a dealer the burden-shifting language some states write in. What you claim, you substantiate, out of your own repair orders. That makes the quality of the submission the whole ball game rather than a formality on the way to a presumption.
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.
The Part Most Dealers Miss
Once a claim is submitted, the manufacturer has 30 days to disapprove it in writing or electronically. Let that window pass without a specific disapproval and the claim is considered approved, with payment due 30 days later.
The law, in other words, 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 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 Wis. Stat. § 218.0125 as published in the Wisconsin Statutes, reviewed July 2026. Statutes change; we re-verify before every filing.