Right to repair: Spare parts and services price Europeans out of fixing their gadgets

The EU’s Right to Repair Directive is now in force, but for many consumers, fixing a broken appliance or smartphone still costs more than buying a new one. The EU’s Right to Repair Directive has been in full force since July 31st, 2026, and the gap between what the law promises and the reality consumers face hasn’t been addressed. Spare parts routinely cost more than the point at which fixing a broken appliance still makes financial sense, and even where a part is cheap, getting someone to fit it can cost more than the item is worth. Parts you can’t even put a price on Before cost comes availability, and the record is patchy. A joint audit of the EU’s official product registry by the Right to Repair Europe coalition and iFixit reviewed over 7.000 listings and found compliance “abysmal”. 80% of smartphone entries lacked usable repair instructions or spare-parts pricing, and nearly half gave no information at all. Half of the tumble dryer models reviewed were non-compliant too. Some manufacturers directed consumers to marketplaces like Temu or AliExpress instead of official parts channels, while 8% wrote “see manual” with no link attached. A June 2026 market check by consumer group BEUC, testing official spare-parts prices for smartphones and battery vacuum cleaners across six EU countries, found the most expensive vacuum cleaner battery cost €281-56% of the appliance’s original price. The priciest replacement part reached €240, or 37% of the product’s price. Flagship smartphone screens topped €400, about 30% of a phone’s retail price, before labour or delivery are added. According to BEUC’s example of a 2025 study from the French environment agency ADEME, people generally choose repair only when the total cost stays within 20-30% of a product’s original price. Beyond that, most switch to buying new. Repair service isn’t cheap either Labour, not parts, usually drives the bill. EU research on coffee machine repairs found a typical job cost €83- €68 of that was labour, and only €15 was the part. A 2025 Consumer Conditions Survey found 61% of people who skipped a repair just after their guarantee ended did so because it was too expensive. Alex Bunodiere, a PhD researcher in KU Leuven’s Life Cycle Engineering group, sees the same arithmetic for small appliances. In Belgium, a repair shop’s minimum callout is around €100, while the median purchase price of a small appliance is about €160. “At €160, who would spend €100 for the repair?” he said. “The proportion of the purchase price to the repair price is still too high.” His research puts France’s repair rate for small appliances at just 17%, even with a national bonus that cuts up to €60 off bigger jobs. Both experts pushed back on the idea that locating a repairer is the industry’s real bottleneck. The gap the EU’s own repair-matching platform, not due until 2027-2028, is meant to close. “I don’t see access to repair as the main bottleneck,” Bunodiere said. “It is a bottleneck, but to me, the price is the primary bottleneck.” René Repasi, the European Parliament’s rapporteur on the file, agreed the platform “would be helpful, but it is not for the right to repair to work.” A search engine usually turns up a nearby repairer in cities, he said, though that gets “more difficult in the rural areas.” A law with no price tag? The directive requires spare parts and repair services to be offered at a “reasonable” price, but sets no formula, cap or benchmark for what that means. Repasi said the ambiguity leaves 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 don’t know” they can push back. Enforcement is also uneven. Only a handful of member states met the 31 July 2026 deadline to transpose the directive, and where implementation is missing, consumers can’t invoke it directly against manufacturers, only claim damages from their own government, leaving, in Repasi’s words, “different qualities of rights depending on which countries they are living in.” How manufacturers still steer buyers towards ‘new’ Manufacturers, Bunodiere said, usually make more profit from a new sale than from a repair job, leaving them “incentivised to sell new products instead of repairing them.” The directive’s exemption for intellectual property still lets companies restrict compatible or third-party parts by citing patents. “Parts pairing” software can stop a swapped component from working until the manufacturer remotely authorises it. Manufacturers’ self-declared repairability scores go largely unchecked by any public authority. Advocacy groups including Right to Repair Europe have proposed capping the priciest spare part at 15-20% 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 idea is commercially workable. Until something similar is written into EU law, both experts said “reasonable” will keep meaning whatever a manufacturer can defend.