Since the EU's Right to Repair Directive took full effect on 31 July 2026, the gap between its promises and everyday reality has become increasingly clear. For many Europeans, repairing a broken smartphone or vacuum cleaner still costs more than buying a new one, undermining the law's environmental and consumer goals.
Spare parts: scarce and overpriced
Before price even comes into play, availability is a major hurdle. A joint audit by the Right to Repair Europe coalition and iFixit, which reviewed over 7,000 listings in the EU's official product registry, found compliance to be “abysmal.” Around 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 also non-compliant. Some manufacturers directed consumers to marketplaces like Temu or AliExpress instead of official parts channels, while 8% simply wrote “see manual” with no link attached.
A June 2026 market check by the European consumer group BEUC, which tested 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 a 2025 study from the French environment agency ADEME, consumers 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. This threshold is rarely met under current pricing.
Labour costs tip the balance
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 that 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 EU's own repair-matching platform, not due until 2027–2028, is meant to close that gap. “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. This leaves, 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.
For now, the EU's repair directive remains a promise without a price tag. As efforts to cut appliance waste continue, the real test will be whether Brussels can turn vague principles into enforceable price controls that make repair the sensible choice for European consumers.
