The EU’s Right to Repair Directive has been fully enforced since July 31, 2026, yet the disparity between its legislative promises and the actual consumer experience remains unresolved.
Replacement components frequently exceed the financial threshold where repairing a damaged appliance remains viable. Even when parts are affordable, the cost of professional installation often surpasses the value of the item itself.
Parts That Cannot Even Be Priced
Before cost becomes an issue, availability presents a significant hurdle. A joint audit of the EU’s official product registry, conducted by the Right to Repair Europe coalition and iFixit, evaluated over 7,000 listings and revealed compliance levels to be abysmal.
Eighty percent of smartphone entries lacked usable repair instructions or spare-part pricing, with nearly half offering no information whatsoever. Half of the tumble dryer models reviewed were similarly non-compliant. Some manufacturers redirected consumers to marketplaces like Temu or AliExpress rather than official parts channels, while 8% simply stated “see manual” without providing an attached link.
A June 2026 market analysis by consumer group BEUC tested official spare-part prices for smartphones and battery vacuum cleaners across six EU countries. The findings revealed that the most expensive vacuum cleaner battery cost €281, representing 56% of the appliance’s original price. The priciest replacement part reached €240, or 37% of the product’s cost. Flagship smartphone screens topped €400—approximately 30% of a phone’s retail price—before labor and delivery fees are added.
According to a 2025 study by the French environment agency ADEME cited by BEUC, consumers generally opt for repair only when the total cost remains within 20% to 30% of a product’s original price. Beyond that threshold, most choose to purchase a new item instead.
Repair Services Are Not Cheap Either
Labor, rather than parts, typically drives the final bill. EU research on coffee machine repairs found a typical job cost €83, of which €68 was labor and only €15 was the part. A 2025 Consumer Conditions Survey found that 61% of people who skipped a repair immediately after their guarantee ended did so because the cost was too prohibitive.
Alex Bunodiere, a PhD researcher in KU Leuven’s Life Cycle Engineering group, observes the same economic arithmetic for small appliances. In Belgium, a repair shop’s minimum callout fee is around €100, while the median purchase price of a small appliance is roughly €160. “At €160, who would spend €100 for the repair?” he asked. “The proportion of the purchase price to the repair price remains too high.” His research places France’s repair rate for small appliances at just 17%, even with a national bonus that discounts up to €60 on larger jobs.
Both experts rejected the notion that locating a repairer is the industry’s primary bottleneck. The EU’s own repair-matching platform, not expected until 2027-2028, is intended to close this gap. “I do not see access to repair as the main bottleneck,” Bunodiere stated. “It is a bottleneck, but to me, the price is the primary one.”
René Repasi, the European Parliament’s rapporteur on the file, agreed that the platform “would be helpful, but it is not essential for the right to repair to work.” He noted that a search engine usually reveals a nearby repairer in cities, though finding one gets “more difficult in rural areas.”
A Law Lacking a Price Definition
The directive mandates that spare parts and repair services be offered at a “reasonable” price, yet it establishes no formula, cap, or benchmark to define that term. Repasi noted that this ambiguity creates room for abuse: a plastic part costing “10 cents” to produce being sold for €350 is “obviously not reasonable,” yet without a legal definition, “some reckless manufacturers would still play the game, simply betting on the fact that consumers do not know” they can push back.
Enforcement is also inconsistent. Only a handful of member states met the July 31, 2026 deadline to transpose the directive, and where implementation is lacking, consumers cannot invoke it directly against manufacturers, only claiming damages from their own government. This leaves, in Repasi’s words, “different qualities of rights depending on which countries they are living in.”
How Manufacturers Continue to Steer Buyers Toward ‘New’
Manufacturers, Bunodiere explained, typically generate more profit from a new sale than from a repair job, leaving them “incentivized to sell new products instead of repairing them.” The directive’s intellectual property exemption still allows companies to restrict compatible or third-party parts by citing patents.
“Parts pairing” software can prevent a swapped component from functioning until the manufacturer remotely authorizes it. Furthermore, manufacturers’ self-declared repairability scores go largely unchecked by any public authority.
Advocacy groups, including Right to Repair Europe, have proposed capping the most expensive spare part at 15% to 20% of a product’s retail price. A French durability label, LONGTIME, already gets manufacturers such as Fairphone and Whirlpool to accept a voluntary ceiling, typically 25%, suggesting the concept is commercially viable. Until something similar is codified into EU law, both experts said “reasonable” will continue to mean whatever a manufacturer can defend.
