· Directive · 9 sources · opinion
The ten-year spare parts rule Google credits to a law that doesn't contain it
Four professional summaries of the EU repair directive disagree about how long a manufacturer must supply spare parts. The figure most often quoted is real, but it belongs to a different regulation, and it is described in a way that shortens it.
The short answer
Directive (EU) 2024/1799 must be applied by member states from 31 July 2026. It does not set any period for spare-parts availability. The phrase “10 years” does not appear in it. Several widely-read summaries, and Google’s AI Overview for the query “right to repair directive”, say the directive requires spare parts for up to ten years after a product’s launch. The ten-year figure is real, but it comes from a separate ecodesign regulation covering washing machines, it does not apply to phones, and the clock it runs on starts at the opposite end of a product’s life from the one those summaries describe.
Where this comes from
I read the directive, then two ecodesign regulations, then the four sources a search result pointed at. Everything quoted below is from the published text of those instruments, all linked in Sources. No manufacturer was contacted and nothing was tested.
One limitation belongs at the top. The search result described in this piece was captured on 27 July 2026, from the United Kingdom, through a search-data provider rather than observed by eye in a browser. Attempting to reproduce it directly returned an automated-traffic block. Overviews of this kind also vary between users, sessions and days. So the fair way to read what follows is: this was the summary returned for that query, on that day, through that route, once. The rest of the finding does not depend on it, and that turned out to matter.
What the directive actually says
Article 22 sets the date:
Member States shall bring into force the laws, regulations and administrative provisions necessary to comply with this Directive by 31 July 2026 at the latest. They shall immediately inform the Commission thereof. […] Member States shall apply those measures from 31 July 2026.
Article 23 provides that the directive itself entered into force twenty days after publication, which was in 2024. Entry into force and application are different events, and coverage routinely runs them together. The thing happening this week is the second one.
On spare parts, the directive’s operative provision, Article 5(6), is about obstruction rather than duration:
Manufacturers shall not use any contractual clauses, hardware or software techniques that impede the repair of goods covered by Union legal acts listed in Annex II unless justified by legitimate and objective factors including the protection of intellectual property rights under Union and national law. Manufacturers shall, in particular, not impede the use of original or second-hand spare parts, compatible spare parts and spare parts issued from 3D-printing, by independent repairers when those spare parts are in conformity with requirements under Union or national law such as requirements on product safety or in compliance with intellectual property.
Article 5(7) adds that manufacturers “shall not refuse to repair” goods covered by those acts. Article 5(5) requires indicative repair prices to be available on a free-access website.
Nowhere does it say how long parts must be available. It points elsewhere:
Spare parts should be made available at least for the time period set out in Union legal acts.
Which Union legal acts, it does not say in that sentence. They are the ecodesign regulations listed in Annex II.
Where the ten years actually lives
The figure is not invented. It is in Regulation (EU) 2019/2023, which covers household washing machines and washer-dryers:
manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives of household washing machines and household washer-dryers shall make available to professional repairers at least the following spare parts, for a minimum period of 10 years after placing the last unit of the model on the market: motor and motor brushes; transmission between motor and drum; pumps; shock absorbers and springs; washing drum, drum spider and related ball bearings
The same regulation extends a shorter list to owners as well as professionals, on the same ten-year basis: door, door hinge and seals, other seals, the door locking assembly and plastic peripherals such as detergent dispensers.
For phones and tablets the number is different. Regulation (EU) 2023/1670 says:
From 20 June 2025 or from one month after the date of placement on the market, whichever is later, manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives shall make available to professional repairers at least the following spare parts […] until at least 7 years after the date of end of placement on the market
Battery, front and rear camera assemblies, external audio connectors, external charging ports and others. A shorter list, including battery, back cover assembly and display, goes to owners as well as professionals on the same seven-year basis. Repair and maintenance information runs for at least seven years too; dismantling information for at least fifteen.
So there are two numbers, they attach to different products, and neither is set by the directive.
The clock starts at the other end
This is the part that changes what a person actually gets, and it is the least remarked on.
The summaries say ten years “after a product’s launch”. Both regulations say something else. The washing-machine rule runs “for a minimum period of 10 years after placing the last unit of the model on the market”. The phone rule runs “until at least 7 years after the date of end of placement on the market”.
Launch is when a model goes on sale. End of placement is when the last one is sold. For a washing machine sold for five years, those are five years apart, and the regulation’s version is the longer one. Describing the obligation as running from launch understates it.
There is a second, smaller inversion in the same sentence. The summaries say “up to 10 years”. The regulation says “a minimum period of 10 years”. Up-to and at-least point in opposite directions: one is a ceiling, the other a floor.
How it has been read
Google’s AI Overview for “right to repair directive”, captured as described above, put this under a heading of key requirements:
Spare Parts: Manufacturers must supply necessary parts and tools at reasonable prices for up to 10 years after a product’s launch.
It attributed the requirements to the directive, and cited four sources. Those four do not agree with each other.
Shakespeare Martineau’s note says: “Manufacturers must ensure spare parts are accessible for consumers and third-party repairers for up to 10 years after a product’s launch.” Same figure, same “up to”, same “after a product’s launch”. The summary did not invent the sentence; it reproduced one.
Freshfields, writing about Germany’s implementing bill, gets it precisely right: the repair obligation “lasts as long as the relevant EU product rules require repairability and the availability of spare parts - typically at least seven years for smartphones and ten years for many large household appliances after a model has been taken off the market”. Both figures, both attributed to the product rules rather than the directive, and the clock started at the correct end.
Lewis Silkin avoids the trap by not making a duration claim at all, noting instead that the directive operates through “product-specific EU legislation under the Ecodesign framework”.
Claimlane says brands must “keep spare parts available for years after a product goes on sale”, which has no figure but repeats the wrong end of the clock.
Two of the four cited sources are right, one is silent, one carries the error, and the summary reproduced the one carrying the error.
It is worth being fair about the rest of that summary. It gets the 31 July 2026 application date right, the one-year guarantee extension right, the prohibition on obstruction right, and it correctly notes the directive reaches sellers outside the European Union. This reads as compression rather than invention, and the compression starts upstream: for a compliance readership the directive and the ecodesign regulations are one workload, so summarising them as one instrument is a natural shortcut. The directive invites it, too, by creating an obligation and then pointing at unnamed other laws for its duration.
The campaigners are unimpressed for a related reason. Right to Repair Europe, a coalition of more than 170 organisations, wrote in its 2026 review that although major legislation had come into effect, “it wasn’t enough to satisfy us”. Its complaint is that the post-warranty repair obligation only bites on products already covered by separate ecodesign rules, leaving coverage uneven: a smartphone is well covered, a coffee machine barely at all. That is the same drafting decision from the other direction. A directive that defers its substance to instruments it does not name is one that is easy to misdescribe and easy to fall outside.
What it means for you
If you are trying to work out how long you can get a part for something, the directive is the wrong document to read. Find the ecodesign regulation for that product category. Phones and tablets: seven years for professional repairers and, for a shorter list of parts, for owners too. Large household appliances: generally ten. Many everyday products, including small kitchen appliances and headphones, are covered by no such regulation at all, and for those the directive’s repair obligation does not apply either.
Whichever applies, count from when the model stopped being sold, not from when it launched. If a washing machine was on sale from 2019 to 2024, the ten years runs from 2024. That is a materially better position than the one the popular summaries describe, and it is worth knowing before accepting that a part is legitimately unavailable.
What changes on 31 July 2026 is narrower than the coverage suggests: an obligation to repair covered goods, a prohibition on techniques that impede repair, indicative prices published on a free website, and an extra year of guarantee where a consumer chooses repair over replacement. The spare-parts periods were already there, in other laws, and they are unchanged by this one.
OpinionA judgement on the facts above, not a finding. It rests only on what is quoted on this page.
Opinion
The directive tells manufacturers what they may not do. It does not tell them what a part may cost.
Article 5(6) prohibits contractual, hardware and software techniques that impede repair. Article 5(7) says a manufacturer may not refuse to repair covered goods. Article 5(5) requires indicative repair prices to be available on a free-access website. Publishing a price is not the same as constraining one, and nothing in the directive sets a test that a price has to pass. On duration it goes further and says nothing at all, handing the question to instruments it does not name.
So the two things that decide whether a repair actually happens, what the part costs and whether it still exists, both sit outside the instrument being described this week as the moment Europe got a right to repair.
There is a fair reason for that. A directive of this kind is consumer law, not price regulation, and fixing prices across twenty-seven member states and every category of product is not something one instrument could sensibly do. Sending durations to the ecodesign regulations puts them where the product-specific expertise sits. Both of those are defensible choices.
What that reasoning does not explain is the gap it leaves. A manufacturer can comply with every word of Article 5, publish its indicative prices, supply every part on the list for the full seven or ten years, and still price those parts so that an independent repair is not worth doing. Nothing in the directive reaches that. The coalition that campaigned for the law says something close to it: Right to Repair Europe’s own review names economic incentives among the barriers this legislation leaves untouched.
In my view that is the measure this directive should be judged by, and on that measure it has not yet done anything at all. The rules have grown a great deal in five years. Whether the price of a repair has moved with them is a separate question, and it is the one most people are actually asking.
Opinion, based on the evidence set out above.