Door Hardware Warranty 2026: What "Ten Year" Actually Covers, the Five Exclusions That Do the Work, and How to Make a Claim Succeed

"Ten year warranty" is the most quoted and least examined line in hardware marketing. The number is chosen for comparison; the document that governs it is rarely read by either party until something fails.

This page is about the document.

Three different things that get called a warranty

The distinction that matters commercially: **a manufacturer's warranty does not replace what the law gives you, and in most jurisdictions cannot reduce it.** A warranty that appears to sign away statutory rights is usually unenforceable in that part, whatever it says.

The second distinction: a warranty is issued by somebody. A factory warranty, a distributor warranty and an installer warranty are three different promises, and on an imported project they frequently do not overlap the way anyone assumed.

The five exclusions that do the real work

Almost every hardware warranty runs to a page, and almost every rejected claim is rejected under one of these five.

**Improper installation.** The largest by a wide margin. A lock fitted in a door prepped to the wrong centre distance, a closer mounted parallel arm when it was sized for a regular arm, a hinge set screwed into a frame with no reinforcement — all of these produce a failed product that the product did not cause. Our door preparation and closer mounting pages exist partly because of this clause.

**Unsuitable environment.** A 201 stainless lever on a coastal door, a plated finish in a chlorinated pool hall, a non-DZR brass cylinder in a wet room. The product performed as its specification says; the specification was wrong for the site. Our corrosion, stainless and brass pages all end in the same place: the environment picks the material, and a warranty does not.

**Inappropriate cleaning.** Acidic, chlorinated or abrasive cleaners on plated finishes, which is covered in detail on our chrome finish page. This exclusion is in every finish warranty in the industry and it is the one building managers most often trip over, because nobody told the cleaning contractor.

**Modification.** Drilling, cutting, re-plating, substituting a component, fitting a trim from another range. Also, on a fire door, any change to the tested assembly — where the warranty question is the smaller of two problems.

**Wear.** A warranty covers defects, not use. A finish that has worn where thousands of hands touch it, a latch that has done two hundred thousand cycles, a closer whose seals have aged — these are the product doing what it does. Our cycle testing page covers what a durability grade actually promises, which is a tested number of cycles rather than a period of years.

Read that list back and a pattern appears: **four of the five are about what happened to the product after it left, and the fifth is about time.** That is why the years in the headline matter less than the conditions in the body.

What a warranty can honestly promise, and what it cannot

A factory can stand behind what it controls: that the part matches its specification, that the material is what was stated, that the manufacturing is free of defects, and that a component which fails from a manufacturing cause will be replaced.

It cannot stand behind what it never sees — the door it was fitted to, the person who fitted it, the cleaner who cleaned it, and the building it lives in. A warranty that appears to cover all of that is either restricted by exclusions that have not been read, or is a promise that will be argued about.

The honest version of a long warranty is therefore narrower and more specific than the marketing version, and it is worth preferring: **a five-year warranty whose scope you understand is worth more than a ten-year one whose exclusions you have not read.**

Who the warranty is with, on an imported project

This is the structural problem behind most warranty disappointment on international orders, and it is nobody's bad faith.

A typical chain has four parties: the factory, the exporter or trading company, the importing distributor, and the contractor who fits it. Each may issue a warranty, each warranty covers a different thing, and none of them automatically extends to the party two steps away.

The gap that opens is the one between the factory's warranty and the building owner. A factory warranty is normally with its customer — the party that placed the order — and the building owner is usually two or three parties downstream.

That is fixable at order stage and almost impossible afterwards. **Ask, before ordering, who the warranty will be with and whether it is assignable.** On a project where the owner will need to claim directly, that has to be written into the purchase terms rather than assumed from a brochure.

Why a failure analysis is worth more than a replacement

The reflex on a warranty claim is to want the part replaced. On a single door that is the right answer.

On forty doors it is the wrong one, because a replacement without a cause is forty parts that will fail the same way. The valuable output of a claim is the diagnosis: whether the failure was manufacturing, specification, installation or maintenance.

Those four lead to four completely different remedies. Manufacturing means replace the batch. Specification means the wrong product is on the opening and replacing it with the same one repeats the problem. Installation means fix the doors, not the hardware. Maintenance means change what the cleaning contractor uses.

A supplier who returns a diagnosis with the replacement is worth more than one who returns only the replacement, and it is a reasonable thing to ask for. Where the answer is "the specification was wrong", that is an uncomfortable conversation and it is also the only one that stops the next thirty-nine.

What a successful claim contains

Claims fail on evidence more often than on merit. Five things make one straightforward.

**The order reference and date.** This sounds obvious and is the single most common missing item. A part that cannot be traced to an order cannot be traced to a batch.

**Photographs of the failure in situ**, before removal, including the surrounding door and frame. The installation is part of the diagnosis, and a photograph of a part on a bench has removed the evidence.

**What the failure is, described physically rather than diagnostically.** "The lever droops and the latch does not fully retract" is useful. "The spring is broken" is a conclusion that may be wrong and that narrows where anybody looks.

**When it started and how the opening is used.** A failure at three weeks and a failure at three years point at different causes, and a door used four hundred times a day is a different case from one used four times.

**The installation details** — who fitted it, what the door preparation was, whether it was adjusted. Not to assign blame, but because a warranty assessor whose first question is "how was it fitted" has to ask it anyway, and a claim that answers it arrives a week ahead.

The claim that is not a warranty claim

Worth naming, because it is common and gets handled badly by both sides.

If a shipment arrives and the parts are not what was ordered — wrong finish, wrong handing, wrong function, wrong quantity — that is not a warranty matter. It is a delivery discrepancy, it is governed by the order and the incoterms rather than by the warranty document, and it has a much shorter clock.

Raise those on receipt, with photographs and the packing list, rather than filing them mentally as something to sort out later. Our samples and inspection page covers what to check on arrival and why the check has to happen before the cartons are distributed to site.

What we do

We state what a model is and what it is made of, and where a figure is not established we leave the row out rather than filling it — which is the same discipline that makes a warranty meaningful, applied earlier.

Warranty terms themselves are set per order and per market rather than published as a headline number, because a term that means something has to name the product, the application and the exclusions. A supplier who leads with a number and has not asked what the door is has told you how long, without telling you for what.

And the clause worth putting in your own specification, covered on our specification page: state the warranty length, what it covers, and whether it survives a change of building owner. "Manufacturer's standard warranty" is not a term — it is an agreement to accept whatever that standard turns out to be.