Warranty Rights: What You Have Before Anyone Hands You a Card

There is a small foil sticker on the back of a lot of electronics that says WARRANTY VOID IF REMOVED. In 2024 the FTC sent warning letters to three companies telling them to stop using exactly that sticker, on the grounds that placing it where a customer can't do routine maintenance without breaking it may violate federal warranty law.

That's the useful way in to this subject. Warranty law in the United States gives you more than the warranty card says, and a good deal of what gets printed on warranty cards is not enforceable.

The two warranties you already have, whether or not anyone wrote one

Implied warranties are unwritten promises created by state law — Section 2-314 and Section 2-315 of the Uniform Commercial Code, which is law in every state except Louisiana. Nobody has to say them out loud. They attach when a merchant sells goods they're in the business of selling.

• The implied warranty of merchantability is the merchant's basic promise that the goods will do what they're supposed to do and that nothing is significantly wrong with them. The FTC's own example: sell an oven, and you're promising it bakes food at the temperature the buyer selects. An oven that doesn't heat, or heats without temperature control, is not fit to be sold as an oven, and the law requires a remedy.
• The implied warranty of fitness for a particular purpose kicks in when you rely on the seller's advice for a specific use. Ask for a washer that handles 15-pound loads, get a recommendation, buy it on that recommendation, and it turns out to handle 10 — that's a breach, even though the machine works fine as a washer.

Two limits worth understanding. Implied warranties are promises about the condition of the goods at the time of sale, not promises that a product lasts a particular length of time, and they don't cover abuse, misuse, ordinary wear, ignoring the instructions, or bad maintenance. And they carry a deadline: state statutes of limitations for breach of warranty generally run four years from the date of purchase. Four years to discover and act on a problem that existed at the sale — not a guarantee the thing survives four years.

Used goods from a dealer carry an implied warranty of merchantability too, scaled to type and price range. A private-party sale between individuals carries none, because the seller isn't a merchant.

"As is" — what it does and where it fails

In most states a seller can disclaim implied warranties, but it has to be conspicuous, generally in writing, and it has to be clear the entire risk falls on you. The magic words are either specifically disclaiming "merchantability" or a phrase like "as is" or "with all faults." A few states don't allow "as is" sales of consumer products at all, so sellers there have obligations they can't write away.

Then the rule that quietly does most of the work: federal law prohibits disclaiming implied warranties on any consumer product if the seller offers a written warranty on it, or sells you a service contract on it. Which means the extended warranty pitch at the register has a consequence the salesperson is unlikely to mention — buying it takes "as is" off the table.

Selling something "as is" also doesn't erase product liability. A defective, dangerous product that injures someone is a separate question from warranty, and the disclaimer doesn't reach it.

Magnuson-Moss: the federal layer on top

The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act governs written warranties on consumer products and is enforced by the FTC. It doesn't require anyone to offer a warranty. It regulates what a warranty may say once offered, and it does three things that matter to you.

1. No disclaiming implied warranties if you offer a written one

No matter how narrow the written warranty, the customer keeps the implied warranty of merchantability. There's one permitted modification: a warranty titled "limited" may restrict implied warranties to the same duration as the written warranty — a two-year limited warranty can cap implied warranties at two years. A warranty titled "full" can't limit their duration at all, because "full" means the coverage meets federal minimum standards and "limited" means it doesn't. The word on the card is a legal term, not marketing.

2. No tie-in sales provisions

This is the one people get bullied over. A warranty generally may not state or imply that you must buy or use a particular brand of part or a particular service provider to keep coverage. Unless the manufacturer supplies those parts or services free of charge, or has obtained a waiver from the FTC, the requirement is prohibited — and the FTC has said such claims may also be independently deceptive under the FTC Act.

The FTC treats "this warranty shall not apply if the warranty seal has been broken, removed, or defaced" as a prohibited tie-in where the device can't be repaired without breaking the seal. That is the foil sticker, and that is why those warning letters went out.

The genuine limit on this: a manufacturer may lawfully refuse to cover damage actually caused by a part or a repair it didn't provide. If an independent shop installs the wrong component and fries the board, that failure isn't covered. Using an independent shop does not void the warranty; a botched job can still leave you paying for the botch.

3. Cost-shifting if you have to sue

Magnuson-Moss makes breach of warranty a violation of federal law and lets a consumer who wins recover court costs and reasonable attorney's fees. That's the provision that makes a $900 warranty dispute economically worth a lawyer's time when it otherwise wouldn't be. It is not a promise you'd win, and nobody can tell you what any particular claim is worth.

A script for the tie-in argument

When a service department tells you the warranty is void because you used an independent shop or a third-party part, the conversation usually turns on whether you know the rule exists:

I understand you're denying coverage because the last service wasn't done here. Under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, a warranty can't be conditioned on using a specific brand of part or a specific service provider unless those are supplied free of charge. If you're saying the independent work caused this specific failure, I'd like that in writing, with the reasoning. If you're not saying that, I'd like the repair covered.

Ask for the denial in writing either way. A written denial that says "warranty void due to third-party service" and nothing about causation is a document worth having if you escalate to the FTC, your state attorney general, or small claims court.

Extended warranties and service contracts: the arithmetic

An extended warranty is not a warranty. It's a service contract — a separate product with a price, sold at a margin, and priced so the seller expects to collect more than it pays out. That is not a scandal; it's how insurance works. It does mean the average buyer loses money on the transaction by design, and that's the right default assumption.

Work the number before you're standing at the counter. A $180 three-year plan on a $600 appliance is 30% of the purchase price. For it to pay, you need a repair costing more than $180 that falls inside the window, isn't already covered by the manufacturer's first year, isn't excluded, and isn't cheaper to just fix. Ask the question that gets skipped: what does this actually cost to repair? If a common failure runs $120, the plan can never pay for itself.

Skip it when the item is cheap enough to replace, when your credit card already extends the manufacturer's warranty (a lot of them do, free, automatically — check your card's benefits guide before paying for anything), or when the plan's exclusions swallow the failures the product actually has. Consider it when a single repair would genuinely wreck your month and you have no cushion — that's buying a smoothed cash flow, not an expected profit, and it's a legitimate reason. Our breakdown of extended car warranties runs the same math for vehicles, where the numbers are bigger and the sales pressure is worse.

If a warranty claim gets denied

1. Get the denial in writing, with the reason stated.
2. Read the written warranty itself. Sellers must make it available to you before purchase under the FTC's Pre-Sale Availability Rule, so ask for the document if you never got one.
3. Escalate above the store: manufacturer customer relations resolves a surprising share of these, because the store and the manufacturer have different incentives.
4. If the warranty names an informal dispute settlement mechanism, you may have to use it before suing. Check that clause.
5. Complain to your state attorney general's consumer protection division, and report deceptive warranty practices to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.
6. For a repair bill inside your state's small claims limit, small claims court is a real option — our small claims guide covers filing, service, and the collection problem that comes after.

Before any of that: put the receipt, the warranty document, and the model and serial number in one place the day you buy anything expensive. A photo of the label on your phone takes eight seconds and is the difference between a claim and an argument.