Last reviewed: 15 September 2026

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Maryland regulates a car's service contract and a home warranty under two completely different laws

Our Indiana page covers a state with detailed vehicle service contract law and nothing at all for a home warranty. Maryland's split looks similar at first glance — real regulation on the vehicle side, something lighter for a home warranty — but the home side isn't a void the way Indiana's is. It's a real, mandatory-disclosure statute; it just has no license, bond, or funded-reserve requirement behind it, and Maryland's own law says explicitly why.

The vehicle side: register with the Insurance Administration, insure the contract, file it in advance

Maryland Code, Transportation §15-311.2, together with Insurance §2-112(a)(9) and (11), requires the "obligor" of a "mechanical repair contract" — Maryland's statutory name for what this Library calls a vehicle service contract — to register with the Maryland Insurance Administration (MIA). Initial registration requires an application, a policy of insurance covering all of the obligor's obligations and liabilities under the contract, disclosure of any regulatory action taken against the obligor by another state, and a $25 non-refundable fee. Separately, the obligor must file the mechanical repair contract itself with MIA at least forty-five days before offering it for sale in Maryland, and must maintain what the statute calls "adequate insurance reserves" for each contract — a requirement the statute itself says is satisfied by that same insurance policy. This framework took effect October 1, 2015, under Chapter 444 of the Acts of 2015.

The home and consumer-product side: no Insurance Administration role at all

A home warranty, or a service contract on any other consumer product, falls instead under Maryland Code, Commercial Law, Title 14, Subtitle 4 — the Maryland Service Contracts and Consumer Products Guaranty Act — which reaches a contract covering personal, family, or household goods or services costing $10 or more, including repair or installation work on a home's electrical, heating, plumbing, or mechanical systems. It requires the contract to be in writing and to disclose five specific things: the guaranty period's duration, any maintenance required to keep it in force, the guarantor's actual obligations during that period, the procedure for obtaining repair or replacement, and any informal dispute-settlement mechanism the guarantor offers. Section 14-409 of that same subtitle states directly that a provider complying with this subtitle need not comply with any provision of the Insurance Article — "except with respect to mechanical repair contracts as expressly provided in §15-311.2 of the Transportation Article." Maryland's own statute, in other words, draws this exact line itself: a home warranty is deliberately carved out of Insurance Administration oversight, while a vehicle mechanical repair contract is expressly carried back into it.

Why this isn't the same story as a state with no home-warranty law at all

This is a meaningfully different pattern from a state like Indiana, which has no dedicated statute reaching a home warranty at all and leaves it to general deceptive-sales law after something goes wrong. Maryland's Title 14 Subtitle 4 is a real, standing, mandatory-disclosure statute that applies from the moment a Maryland home warranty is sold, and it gives a consumer a private right to enforce those specific disclosure obligations. What it doesn't do — deliberately, per its own §14-409 carve-out — is require a license, a registration, a bond, or a funded reserve behind the promise, the way its own vehicle-side counterpart does for a mechanical repair contract.

What this means for a Maryland buyer

For a vehicle mechanical repair contract, you can ask whether the obligor is actually registered with MIA and confirm the insurance policy backing it — a real, checkable fact under state law. For a home warranty, that checking exercise doesn't exist in Maryland: state law entitles you to the five specific written disclosures above, but there is no state registry, license, or bond standing behind the promise for you to verify independently. That makes point 4 of our standard — verifying the funded-claims mechanism directly, not from marketing — even more important to ask about yourself in Maryland than in a state where the law already requires an answer.