Europe just banned the tricks. It forgot to ban the price.

Right now, across Europe, national parliaments are quietly writing the EU's Right to Repair Directive into law. Most people will never read a line of it. Most coverage will call it a win for consumers and move on. And in one important way, it is a win: the Directive bans the contractual, hardware and software tricks manufacturers have used for years to make repair harder than it needs to be. That's real, and it matters.

But I've spent the last two years working on this file as a board member of EUREFAS, the European Refurbishment Association, and I want to say plainly what the coverage is going to miss: this law stops one clause short of making repair actually affordable. And that one clause is the only one that decides whether anyone actually repairs anything.

What the Directive gets right

The rule is simple: manufacturers can no longer use contracts, software or hardware to block repair. No more voiding warranties because you used a third-party screen. No more software locks that "detect" a part swap and cripple the device. These practices existed, they were widespread, and now they're illegal. That's a genuine achievement, and it's one refurbed has pushed for, through EUREFAS, through the Right to Repair Campaign Europe, through the EU public consultation, and through direct meetings with the Commission unit and MEPs working on this file.

What it leaves open

Here's the problem. The Directive says spare parts must be priced "reasonably" and must not "deter repair." It never defines what that means. No benchmark, no formula, no number. It hands the question to national courts, one case at a time, one member state at a time. Based on what we've seen so far in Germany and Austria, the two markets we've reviewed in depth, is that both are transposing close to the EU floor, without adding the extra protections the Directive explicitly allows them to add. Austria has also let its own repair-bonus scheme lapse, and will now need to reintroduce one before 2029.

I want to be careful here: this isn't a takedown of any single government. We don't have the research depth across all 27 member states to make that case, and it wouldn't be fair to single anyone out based on two data points. The pattern we're seeing is a legislative one, not a national one: an EU floor that nobody yet has an incentive to build above.

There's a second gap, and for the refurbishment and second-hand sector, it's the one that worries me more. The Directive bars manufacturers from blocking repair, then immediately exempts anything "justified by legitimate and objective factors, including intellectual property rights." Nobody defines "legitimate." In practice, that leaves the door open for a manufacturer to invoke a patent or a trademark to block exactly what the law claims to protect: compatible parts, second-hand parts, 3D-printed parts. Parts pairing and "genuine parts only" messaging can walk straight through that exemption. The law bans the front door and leaves the back door unlocked.

The fix isn't complicated

We're proposing three concrete changes, and none of them require reopening the whole Directive:

First, anchor "reasonable" to something measurable; a published formula or cap, for example capping the most expensive spare part at 20% of the product's price, so repair stays meaningfully cheaper than replacement, and so consumers and enforcement bodies have a number to check instead of a concept to litigate.

Second, replace the blanket IP exemption with a narrow, enumerated list of justifications – verified safety non-compliance, proven counterfeit use – and put the burden of proof on the manufacturer, not the customer.

Third, write anti-part-pairing and anti-repair-blocking rules explicitly into national Right to Repair law, so they're a direct legal right rather than something consumers have to reach for indirectly through environmental legislation.

One more thing this law isn't

I'd also ask people to be precise about what this Directive is and isn't. It is not what makes products more repairable in the first place, because that's the job of the separate EU Ecodesign Regulation, which sets the design requirements for how easy a product is to open, part-swap and fix. A right to repair only matters if the product is actually repairable. The two laws need each other, and we should talk about them together, but crediting one for the other's job is a factual error, not a nuance.

Why refurbed cares

We're a marketplace for refurbished electronics, so people sometimes assume our interest in repair law is just business. It's more basic than that: every repair that happens instead of a replacement is a device that stays in use longer, and that's the entire point of what we do. We don't need Europe to declare a symbolic right to repair. We need a repair market where the price of a spare part is public, predictable, and genuinely cheaper than buying new. Right now, that's still not guaranteed, and until "reasonable" means something specific, the right to ask for a fair repair price is worth exactly as much as the number nobody wrote down.

Kilian Kaminski is co-founder of refurbed and a board member of EUREFAS, the European Refurbishment Association.