Does Texas have a lemon law, and what does it do?
Yes. The Texas lemon law is Texas Occupations Code chapter 2301, Subchapter M (§§ 2301.601 through 2301.613), and it is administered by the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles rather than the courts. It requires the manufacturer of a new motor vehicle to repair defects covered by the express warranty, and where a serious defect cannot be fixed after a reasonable number of attempts, the state can order the manufacturer to buy the vehicle back or replace it.
Getting that relief runs through an administrative complaint to TxDMV, with a $35 filing fee set by statute and a strict filing deadline: no later than six months after the earliest of the express warranty's expiration, or 24 months or 24,000 miles after the vehicle's original delivery. The deadline structure has sharp edges; the deadlines page takes it apart clock by clock.
What this part of the site covers
The Texas wing is organized around the questions readers actually arrive with, not around the statute's own section order:
RV, motor home, or boat
Two more pages carry the questions with the sharpest consequences: how the complaint process works and which deadlines apply. And because the first question many readers actually type is about money, who pays the lawyer has its own page rather than a slogan.
Checked against the official text on August 24, 2026: the substantive lemon law statute has not moved or renumbered. Sections 2301.601 through 2301.613 stand at their current numbers, and the most recent change to the subchapter is from 2021, when the Legislature added an open-records provision (§ 2301.612). So a citation to §§ 2301.601-.613 is good, and a page claiming the lemon law statute recently relocated is wrong.
The procedural hearing rules are a different story, and this is where stale citations actually live. They are now at 43 TAC, Part 10, Chapter 224, Subchapter G, "Lemon Law and Warranty Performance Claims" (§§ 224.230 through 224.268), confirmed against the Secretary of State's portal and TxDMV's own pages on August 25, 2026. Every section of that subchapter took effect June 1, 2024, published at 49 TexReg 2771, and none has been amended since. Chapter 224 came from a rulemaking the department proposed in December 2023 that, in its own words, consolidated adjudicative procedure rules previously spread across several chapters, including Chapter 215, into one chapter. So a page citing Chapter 215 hearing rules is citing the old world.
How do I file, and how long do I have?
You file an administrative complaint with TxDMV, not a lawsuit. The filing fee is $35, set by Tex. Occ. Code § 2301.712(a)(1), and if you prevail the nonprevailing party reimburses it. Before the state can order a buyback or replacement, the manufacturer must have received written notice of the defect and an opportunity to cure it, and the parties must participate in mediation before a hearing. Each of those steps, with its citation, is on the complaint page.
The filing deadline is the single most unforgiving fact in this body of law: six months after the earliest of the warranty's expiration, 24 months, or 24,000 miles from original delivery. The deadlines page names every clock separately instead of collapsing them into one number, and tells you plainly to confirm your own dates with the agency or an attorney rather than calculating from any website, including this one.