Directive 2024/1799: manufacturers must repair covered goods from 31 July 2026, including products already sold. The Commission's first report on the Directive is due by 31 July 2031.
A right to repair can be written into law. It cannot, by itself, tell a manufacturer which request is in scope, which part is available, or who is allowed to do the work.
Directive (EU) 2024/1799 promotes the repair of goods. Member States were due to transpose it and apply it from 31 July 2026. National implementation remains uneven, but the operating question for manufacturers of covered products is already live.
The duty to repair sits on goods for which Union law already sets reparability requirements — listed in Annex II, and drawn mainly from ecodesign measures. The set includes household appliances and consumer electronics such as washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators, displays, mobile phones and tablets. Manufacturers must repair those goods, at the consumer’s request, within a reasonable time and for a reasonable price, unless repair is impossible. The obligation continues after the legal guarantee, for as long as the underlying reparability requirements — including spare-part availability — still apply.
Fulfilment is the operating test
Manufacturers may subcontract repair. They may not use contractual clauses, hardware or software techniques that impede repair of Annex II goods unless justified by legitimate, objective factors. Where they make spare parts and tools available, prices must be reasonable and must not deter repair.
They must also make repair-service information easy to find, including indicative prices for typical repairs. Inside the legal guarantee, choosing repair over replacement extends that guarantee by 12 months. A European online platform is intended to help consumers find repairers.
The evidence sits across product master data, eligibility rules, spare-part catalogues, authorised-repairer networks, logistics and customer communications. A legal memo that “we must repair” does not process a request, allocate a part, or produce the status a customer — or an authority — can rely on.
The risk is not only an unanswered request. It is running a repair obligation through ad hoc inboxes, with no record of eligibility, price, parts or outcome.
Where readiness breaks
- Eligibility: whether this product, defect and period fall under the duty to repair, and how impossibility is decided and recorded.
- Fulfilment: parts, tools, authorised or subcontracted repairers, reasonable price and time, and a status the customer can see.
- Documentation: what was offered, refused, repaired or replaced, and the rationale that would stand if the request is later disputed.
These are connected decisions. Treating repair as a after-sales courtesy, a spare-parts catalogue or a legal obligation in isolation leaves the organisation to invent a process on each request.
What Ontzi builds
Ontzi turns the duty into a request-to-repair operating model. We connect incoming requests to eligibility, authorised repairers and parts, keep status visible, and preserve the customer and legal documentation that shows what happened and why.
The immediate output is a workable repair path. The durable value is a repeatable capability: the organisation knows which goods it must repair, how a request moves, who owns exceptions and what evidence remains.
The Directive is the right. The operating model is what makes it usable.
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This field note is general information, not legal advice. Which products sit in Annex II, how national law transposes the duty, and how “reasonable” price and time are applied should be checked for each manufacturer.