Right to Repair Goes Global: What the New Laws Mean for Consumers

The right to repair movement has achieved its most significant victories in 2025 and early 2026. The EU's Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, combined with new US federal legislation, is forcing electronics manufacturers to provide spare parts, repair manuals, and diagnostic tools to consumers and independent repair shops.

What's Actually Changing

Starting in 2026, manufacturers selling electronics in the EU must make spare parts available for at least 7 years after a product is discontinued. They must provide repair manuals to any consumer who requests them. And they cannot void warranties simply because a device was repaired by a third party.

Impact on the Tech Industry

Apple, Samsung, and Google have already expanded their self-service repair programs. The bigger shift is in product design: devices are being engineered with repairability in mind, using modular components and standard fasteners instead of glue and proprietary screws.

What the laws unlock in practice

The single biggest practical change for consumers is parts pricing and availability. Apple, Samsung, and Google now publish part catalogs for current and recent models, with prices typically a fraction of what authorized service centers charged before the legislation landed. A Pixel 9 screen that cost over 250 dollars to replace through Google's service in 2023 is around 130 dollars as a do-it-yourself kit in 2026, with the official tools available for short-term rental. iFixit's repair guide library has expanded to cover every device above a certain market share threshold.

Independent repair shops are the second beneficiary. New York's Digital Fair Repair Act, Minnesota's omnibus bill, and the EU's right to repair directive all force manufacturers to provide the same diagnostic tools and firmware unlocks to independent shops as they do to authorized partners. That has revived neighborhood repair businesses that nearly went extinct, and it has created a pricing alternative for consumers who do not want to ship a device across the country and wait two weeks for it to come back.

Parts pairing is the unresolved frontier. Manufacturers have historically married specific batteries, displays, and cameras to a device's logic board via software locks, so that swapping in a genuine but unpaired part triggers warning messages or disables features like True Tone. The new laws ban most of this for cosmetic and safety-related parts, but biometric components like Face ID modules and fingerprint sensors are still a gray area. Expect a steady stream of FTC and EU enforcement actions through 2026 as regulators test the limits of what counts as a security exception.

Software longevity is the quieter win. France's repairability index, the EU's ecodesign rules, and California's law all require manufacturers to provide security updates for a minimum number of years, typically seven for phones and five for laptops. Fairphone has used this requirement as a marketing centerpiece, but the bigger story is the mainstream brands quietly extending their update windows to comply. A phone purchased in 2026 will receive patches into the early 2030s, which transforms the resale market and the secondhand environmental math.

There are limits worth acknowledging. Devices physically designed to be unrepairable, like glued-in batteries or chips soldered to logic boards, are still common, and the new laws nudge but do not mandate modular design. Activists are pushing for the next phase of legislation to require minimum disassembly times, similar to the way appliance regulations specify maintenance access. Until that arrives, consumers can use the iFixit repairability score, the French index, and FrAndroid's database to vote with their wallets for designs that respect ownership.

What the EU law actually forces manufacturers to do

The EU's Right to Repair Directive, in force since July 2024 with full member-state transposition due in 2026, is the most aggressive of the new laws. It forces manufacturers to repair covered products within a reasonable price even after warranty, prohibits the use of contractual or software techniques that block independent repair, mandates spare parts availability for at least seven years for smartphones and ten years for washing machines, and requires that repair information be published in a non-discriminatory format for independent shops.

Crucially, the law also targets parts pairing, the practice of cryptographically binding a component to a specific device's logic board so a third-party replacement either does not work or triggers warning screens. Apple has already changed iPhone behavior in EU markets to accept third-party batteries and screens without crippling features, a shift that began with the iPhone 15 firmware and is universal by the iPhone 17 series. That single change is the most visible win consumers will feel in their daily lives.

How US state laws are diverging in important ways

The US picture is more fragmented but moving fast. New York's Digital Fair Repair Act, Minnesota's Digital Fair Repair Act, Colorado's HB23-1011 and HB24-1121, California's SB 244, and Oregon's SB 1596 form a patchwork of coverage. Oregon's law is the strongest, explicitly banning parts pairing, while California requires manufacturers to provide repair documentation and tools for seven years on devices costing more than 100 USD. Most manufacturers have chosen to comply nationally rather than maintain state-specific SKUs, which means the practical effect of Oregon's bill is to set a de facto US floor.

Federal action is still slow, but the FTC's 2021 Nixing the Fix report and the agency's renewed enforcement under Lina Khan and her successor have shifted the climate. Microsoft, Samsung, Google, and Apple all expanded self-service repair programs nationally, and the iFixit partnership network has roughly tripled in the US since 2022. The change is real, even if no single federal statute drives it.

What the laws miss: software lifespan and security updates

Most repair laws focus on hardware and ignore the software cliff that often makes a working device useless. A perfectly repairable Android phone with no security updates is a liability, not an asset. The EU's Cyber Resilience Act, which entered force in late 2024 and applies from 2027, partially closes this gap by requiring connected products to receive security updates for the expected lifetime of the product, with a minimum that defaults to five years for most categories. Google and Samsung both pre-emptively extended Pixel and Galaxy S-series updates to seven years to align with these rules.

The Cyber Resilience Act is doing as much for actual device longevity as the repair laws are, and it gets less press. Together, the two regimes mean a phone bought in 2026 in Europe should reliably last seven years with software updates and have repairable hardware throughout. That is the most consumer-friendly device baseline any major market has ever established.

The economic case manufacturers quietly accepted

Manufacturers fought the early bills hard and lost most of them. The reason they have stopped fighting publicly is that the economics turned out to be less catastrophic than projected. Samsung's repair revenue grew 28 percent year-over-year in 2024, according to its annual report. Apple's Self Service Repair store, derided as a stunt at launch, has quietly become a real business and has lowered Apple's own logistics costs for in-warranty repairs. The fear that consumers would buy fewer new devices simply has not materialized at meaningful scale.

What did happen is a shift in margin mix. Manufacturers make less on planned-obsolescence upgrades and more on accessories, services, and ecosystem subscriptions. Apple's services revenue is the obvious example, but Samsung Knox, Google One, and Garmin Connect Premium tell the same story. Right to repair did not kill the device business. It changed which part of the business mattered, and most major players have already adjusted strategy.

What independent repair shops finally have access to

The biggest practical change for consumers is the resurgence of local repair shops. In a typical European city in 2026, you can walk into an independent shop and get an authorized iPhone screen, Samsung battery, or MacBook keyboard replacement using genuine parts at roughly 60 to 70 percent of the manufacturer-direct price. Apple's Independent Repair Provider program now has over 5,000 partners worldwide. Samsung's parts pipeline through Encompass and PartsTown is open to any qualified business.

For consumers, the practical impact is twofold. First, prices for common repairs have dropped meaningfully, with iPhone screen replacements down roughly 25 percent in real terms since 2022. Second, turnaround time has collapsed from weeks of mail-in service to often same-day in-shop. The economic surplus from those shifts is going to consumers, repair workers, and small business owners, not just to the manufacturers, which is exactly what the laws intended.

What still needs to happen, and who is dragging their feet

Agricultural equipment is the laggard. John Deere signed a memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau in 2023 promising better repair access and has, by most farmer accounts, failed to deliver on diagnostic tool availability and parts pricing. The Colorado HB23-1011 specifically targets ag equipment, and similar bills are moving in Nebraska, Iowa, and Montana. Until those pass, farmers in much of the US still cannot independently service a 600,000 USD combine without authorized dealer software they cannot legally buy.

Medical devices are another laggard, and arguably the one with the highest stakes. Hospitals routinely run ventilators, MRI machines, and infusion pumps long past the manufacturer's preferred replacement cycle. PIRG's research shows that hospital biomedical engineering departments could service most of this equipment if manufacturers provided service manuals and parts. The PIRG-supported federal legislation, the Critical Medical Infrastructure Right to Repair Act, has been reintroduced repeatedly and remains stuck in committee. That is the next frontier, and it matters more than any consumer-electronics fight.