My washing machine died on a Tuesday. Well — didn’t die exactly. It threw an error code the manual didn’t cover, refused to drain, and when I finally got someone on the phone, the answer was: bring it to an authorized center, for a quote that came in around 60% of the price of a new machine.
So I went digging, mostly out of stubbornness, and ended up somewhere I didn’t expect. I didn’t actually own that washing machine. Not in any way that mattered. I owned the right to use it the way the manufacturer decided I could, for as long as they felt like supporting it. Everything past that was their call.
That’s right to repair in a nutshell, and it’s a bigger fight than one broken appliance. It covers phones, tractors, wheelchairs, laptops, cars — and technically my washing machine too, if I’d lived somewhere with the right law on the books. Filed under “consumer protection,” which is accurate but undersells it. The real question is bigger: once nearly everything you buy has a chip inside it, what does “owning” it even mean?
Key Takeaways
- Right to repair laws force manufacturers to make parts, tools, diagnostics and manuals available to owners and independent shops, not just their own certified network.
- 13 U.S. states now have electronics right to repair laws on the books as of mid-2026. The EU’s Directive (EU) 2024/1799 became binding across every member state on July 31, 2026.
- Manufacturers talk about safety. The real fight is over parts pairing — software that ties a replacement part to one specific device and won’t let it work otherwise.
- A federal right to repair law still doesn’t exist in the U.S. Even a bipartisan provision covering military equipment got quietly cut from the 2026 defense bill.
- Under the legal fight sits a philosophical one: does buying something mean you own the object, or just a license to use it on someone else’s terms?
What “Right to Repair” Actually Means
Worth separating this from something people assume they already have: warranty protection. The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, a U.S. federal law from 1975, already bars manufacturers from voiding your warranty just because you got work done somewhere other than their own shop. Fair enough — that’s been the rule for fifty years.
Right to repair asks for more. It’s newer legislation requiring manufacturers to actually make parts, diagnostic software, firmware and manuals available, to owners and to independent shops, not just an authorized network. Without that, the warranty protection above is mostly symbolic. You can take your device anywhere you want — good luck if nobody’s allowed to sell that shop the part it needs.
The modern push traces back to the FTC’s Nixing the Fix report, published in May 2021. It looked at every justification manufacturers gave for restricting repair — safety, security, quality control — and found most of them didn’t survive contact with the evidence. Legislators have been citing it in hearings from Colorado to California ever since. Nearly every state bill on this topic still leans on it somewhere in the fine print.
And it keeps expanding past gadgets. Wheelchairs got covered in Oregon and Nevada. Agricultural equipment got dragged in through years of lawsuits against John Deere. A handful of state bills now touch medical devices too. Different industries, same underlying pattern: whoever controls repair controls how long a product stays useful, and for whom.
There’s a sustainability angle in here too, even though most of these bills get framed purely as consumer protection. A phone or a washing machine that gets fixed instead of landfilled is one less pile of e-waste and one less round of raw materials that has to be mined again. Right to repair legislation rarely mentions the environment explicitly, but it’s a big part of why groups like Repair.org keep pushing as hard as they do.
Why Manufacturers Fight It
Public support for right to repair isn’t really in question at this point. The National Federation of Independent Business, hardly a radical outfit, says close to 90% of its own members back right to repair legislation, and it’s one of the rare issues that shows up on campaign platforms from both parties in the same election cycle.
So why the resistance? Ask a manufacturer why they push back and you’ll hear three arguments on rotation: safety, intellectual property, cybersecurity. Hand out diagnostic software, the logic goes, and you’ve handed a map of the device’s internals to whoever wants it. Let anyone swap in a replacement part and eventually someone botches the job, blames the brand, and the company eats the reputational hit for a repair it didn’t even do.
Some of that holds up, to be fair. Vehicle telematics genuinely is a sensitive attack surface. A badly reassembled battery pack can, in fact, catch fire. But the FTC dug into this specifically and came up mostly empty — repair restrictions don’t track especially well with safety outcomes. What they track with is revenue. Keep repair inside the authorized network and every dollar spent fixing a product you already sold once flows straight back to you.
Apple is the case study everyone reaches for, and for good reason. The company didn’t offer a self-repair option to the public until November 2021, and that only came after years of shareholder pressure, looming state legislation, and an unusually public letter backing California’s repair bill. Even then, there was one line Apple wouldn’t cross: pairing. More on that shortly.
Ask enough manufacturers and you get roughly the same answer: authorized repair, with authorized parts, done by authorized technicians, is the only way to guarantee the product still works the way it was designed to. Anything else is a risk the company would rather not carry.
Fair position, honestly, and not a purely self-serving one either. It’s just also, conveniently, the exact arrangement that keeps every repair dollar in-house.
Where the Law Stands in 2026
There’s no single right to repair law. There are dozens of them, moving at different speeds, covering different categories, in different places — phones here, tractors there, wheelchairs somewhere else entirely.
The United States: A Patchwork, Not a Policy
Thirteen states had enacted some version of an electronics right to repair law as of July 2026, according to a compliance rundown from law firm Faegre Drinker. New York, California, Colorado, Minnesota, Oregon and Washington got there first; Connecticut’s and Texas’s rules take effect this year too. Colorado’s HB 1121, signed in 2024 and in force since January 1, 2026, goes after the parts-identification software manufacturers use to steer people away from independent repair.
Federal progress has been slower, and messier. The REPAIR Act, meant to give vehicle owners and independent shops access to diagnostic data, got folded into a narrower bill, the Motor Vehicle Modernization Act (H.R. 7389), once the House Energy and Commerce Committee stripped its telematics access mandate in May 2026. It still cleared committee 48 to 1, for what it’s worth, which says something about how popular the idea is even gutted. Around the same time, a separate provision letting service members repair their own field equipment got quietly dropped from the 2026 defense policy bill in December 2025, despite senators from both parties backing it.
The biggest actual win came out of agriculture, of all places. John Deere, the industry’s go-to villain here thanks to software that keeps farmers from fixing their own tractors mid-harvest, settled a $99 million class-action suit in spring 2026, then reached a separate deal with the FTC in July, agreeing to open its repair ecosystem to farmers and independent techs.
Then there’s Massachusetts, which depending on your patience is either the most hopeful data point here or the most depressing one. Voters passed a right to repair ballot measure in 2020, covering vehicle telematics data, by more than three to one. Automakers sued before it even took effect. Six years later, in 2026, it’s still stuck in federal court. No ruling yet.
The European Union Sets the Pace
The U.S. is fighting this state by state. The EU just did it once, for everyone. Directive (EU) 2024/1799, adopted back in June 2024, became applicable in every member state on July 31, 2026, which, as you’re reading this, was only a few weeks ago.
It covers a defined list: smartphones, tablets, washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators, servers, anything running on a light-transport battery. Manufacturers now have to repair those goods within a reasonable time, for a reasonable price, warranty period or not. Pick repair over replacement and your legal guarantee gets an extra year tacked on. Software or contract tricks meant to block repair are banned outright, unless a manufacturer can point to a legitimate, objective reason — a standard that’s going to get argued over in court for a while yet.
It also pairs with the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, which handles the upstream stuff: spare-parts availability, how easy a product is to take apart in the first place. That’s the EU’s right to repair framework working as a connected system rather than one standalone law. One directive, one set of rules, applied continent-wide. A very different shape than fifty state legislatures fighting the identical fight fifty separate times. Any company selling into both markets now has a real incentive to just build the repairable version everywhere, rather than keep maintaining two separate product lines.
Parts Pairing: The New Battleground
If you only learn one term from the right to repair fight, make it parts pairing. It’s software that links one specific replacement part, a screen, a battery, a camera module, to one specific device, usually through a serial-number check. Put in a real, fully functional part that hasn’t been “paired,” and the device might throw endless warnings, quietly disable a feature, or just refuse to fully recognize it.
Manufacturers call it anti-theft protection. Repair advocates call it a repair tax wearing a security costume. Oregon banned the practice outright in its 2024 law, the first state to do so, and it’s the single provision Apple pushed back on hardest, even while otherwise supporting the rest of the bill. Sound familiar? It’s basically the same trick cloud computing already pulled on what it means to own a computer: the hardware sits in your hands, but the software gating it belongs to someone else, running on terms they can change whenever they want.
The Repair Association’s 2026 model legislation pushes further still, barring manufacturers from using software to restrict which tools can be used in a repair, not just which parts. Read between the lines and that’s the actual trajectory here — not one dramatic resolution, more a slow, grinding closure of every loophole a manufacturer manages to find.
The Deeper Philosophy: Ownership vs. Access
Cut through the legislative language and right to repair keeps circling back to one thing: when you buy a product, what did you actually get? The object, free and clear? Or a license to use it, on terms the seller reserves the right to change later, whenever it suits them?
For most of the last century that question barely came up. A toaster was a toaster — no firmware, no chip, no update that could quietly change how it worked. Not true of much anymore. The same logic reshaping what “owning” something even means once everything is licensed instead of sold outright has crept into physical hardware too, and it’s roughly the same shift that turned so much of software into a subscription, just wearing a toaster costume this time instead of a login screen.
iFixit co-founder Kyle Wiens said it about as plainly as it gets: “If you can’t fix it, you don’t own it.” It’s close to a founding slogan for the self-repair movement at this point, the idea that being able to open a thing up and understand it isn’t some bonus feature of ownership. It’s the whole point of the thing.
Manufacturers see it differently, and the argument deserves more than a shrug. To them, a product isn’t just a stack of parts, it’s an experience they’re still responsible for long after the sale closes, reputationally and sometimes legally. Lose control over how something gets fixed, and you lose control over whether it keeps working the way it was designed to, and whose fault it is when it doesn’t. You’ll find the same trade-off across the open-versus-closed divide in tech more broadly; it’s just wearing a slightly different costume here.
What This Actually Means for You
This isn’t purely theoretical. Right to repair already has practical implications the next time you’re buying something with a battery in it, or trying to get one fixed:
- Check your own state or country’s law first. Coverage is wildly uneven — fully protected in Colorado or under the EU directive, unprotected wherever there’s no law yet.
- Ask about parts pairing before you buy, especially for phones and laptops. A brand that limits and discloses its own pairing practices is making a different bet than one that just stays quiet.
- Remember a warranty isn’t right to repair. Not voiding your warranty at an independent shop means little if that shop can’t actually get the parts or documentation to do the job.
- Look for a repairability score, where one exists. France’s repairability index and the EU’s newer labeling rules give you an actual number to compare, instead of a marketing line.
- Don’t assume newer automatically means less repairable. Regulatory pressure has pushed some manufacturers toward easier teardown design in exactly the markets covered by right to repair laws, so a current-generation device sold in Colorado or the EU may genuinely be easier to fix than the one it replaced.
Where Right to Repair Goes From Here
Right to repair doesn’t resolve in one clean moment. It resolves state by state, directive by directive, product category by category, unevenly, depending on how much lobbying muscle shows up to fight any given bill.
What’s actually changed by 2026 is the direction things are moving. The EU has a continent-wide directive in force now, not just proposed. Thirteen U.S. states have working law, and more bills got introduced this year than in any prior session. Even the industries that fought hardest, agriculture after Deere’s settlements, consumer electronics after the first parts-pairing bans, are arguing over the terms of their retreat now, not whether to retreat at all.
Keep an eye on 2027, too. The EU’s online repair platform, mandated by the same directive, is due to go live the following year, and the Repair Association is already drafting its next model bill for the states that haven’t moved yet. None of that guarantees right to repair wins everywhere. It just means the fight isn’t slowing down.
The bigger question underneath all of this was never really about screwdrivers. It’s whether “ownership” survives a world where nearly everything you buy also happens to run software. However any individual bill or lawsuit shakes out, right to repair has already done one thing worth noting: it dragged that question into the open, where it’s a lot harder to quietly ignore.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does right to repair actually get you? Right to repair mostly gets you access to the parts, tools, diagnostic software and manuals a manufacturer would otherwise keep inside its own authorized network. It doesn’t force a company to design an easily repairable product in the first place, just to stop blocking repair once you own one. Coverage still depends heavily on where you live.
What’s parts pairing, in plain terms? A serial-number check that ties one replacement part to one device. Swap in a genuine part that hasn’t gone through that check and the device may still technically work, but with features disabled or warnings that won’t go away, pressure toward the manufacturer’s own repair channel dressed up as a safety measure.
Is there a federal right to repair law in the U.S.? Not yet. Right to repair in the U.S. runs entirely on state law right now, 13 states as of 2026. Bills like the REPAIR Act have cleared committee without becoming law, and some provisions, including ones covering military gear, have been stripped out of other legislation entirely.
