How the Right to Repair and Ecodesign regulations could affect the prices of spare parts.

If you fix phones, tablets, laptops, or any other electronics, listen up: The EU is tightening rules on spare parts pricing—and it’s going to impact your work.

A new position paper from the Right to Repair Europe coalition lays out big policy changes that are being pushed in 2025. These changes aim to make repairs easier, cheaper, and more transparent for everyone, especially independent repair technicians like you.

Here’s the breakdown in 4 topics:

💶 1. Manufacturers May Have to Lock in Spare Part Prices

Today, spare part prices from OEMs (like Apple and Samsung) can change without warning. The proposed rule? If a brand declares a part price, they’d have to stick to it—no surprise markups years down the line.

✅ This would help you give accurate repair quotes
✅ No more finding out that a display or battery suddenly costs double
✅ Could even stop OEMs from making devices “too expensive to fix” on purpose

📊 2. Spare Part Prices Might Become Part of the Repairability Score

From June 2025, smartphones sold in the EU must display a repairability score. Think A to E grade, like energy labels—but for repair.

Right now, these scores are missing one key thing: part pricing. The paper pushes hard to fix that.

🔧 They propose a scoring system where cheaper parts = better repair score
📉 If a part costs over 28% of the product price = 0 points
🟢 Under 10% = 10 points

This means expensive parts could drag down a phone’s repair score, and consumers will start paying attention. The Right to Repair Europe coalition is proposing to use a similar scoring grid as the French Indice de Réparabilité, with scores ranging from 0 to 10 points for price ratios ranging from >28% to ≤10% of the product price Pprod, as illustrated in the following table. This formula already works in France, and it could become EU-wide.

More about this score:

Score calculation and weighting of criteria
As with the French Indice de Réparabilité, the score is calculated based on the price of spare parts to price of product ratio Rprice, which is the ratio of the average of the price of the most expensive priority part Pex and the sub-average of the prices of the other parts P1-n (limited to the list of parts listed in the Ecodesign regulation - see below), divided by the product price Pprod.

So: Repair price score = ((display+((battery + charging port + camera_front + camera_rear + main speaker + microphone + SIM tray + back cover/8))/2)/Product price

Want to know what Apple and Samsung’s top phones offer? Stay tuned for the next blog!

🚧 3. The “Bundling Problem” Will Be Addressed

Ever had to buy an entire display assembly when all you needed was the glass? The paper calls out this issue—parts bundling—and proposes penalizing manufacturers for it in the scoring system.

🙌 That’s great news if you like doing modular repairs or sourcing individual components.

🔍 4. Pricing Data Should Be Public and Easy to Find

The group also wants spare parts pricing info to be:

• Available in manufacturer documentation

• Searchable by product model

• Publicly accessible (like on a website or QR code)

• Visible at the point of sale

This kind of transparency would make it easier to plan repairs, stock parts, and explain costs to customers.

🧭 The Bottom Line

If these proposals go through, it will become harder for manufacturers to inflate part prices and hide behind fake repairability. And for you as a repair tech, this could mean:

✅ More affordable parts
✅ Better access to pricing info
✅ A stronger case to convince customers to repair, not replace

Stay tuned and start thinking about how your pricing and part sourcing might fit into this new, more transparent system.

📱 Typical Priority Spare Parts in Ecodesign Regulations (for smartphones & tablets):

• Display / Screen assembly

• Battery

• Charging port / USB connector

• Buttons (power, volume, home)

• Cameras (front and back)

• Speakers

• Microphone(s)

• SIM tray or SD card slot

• Back cover

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  Please find  here a link to the whte paper of Right-to-repair.