The Right to Repair Rules Are a Win for Small Repair Businesses. Most of Them Cannot Be Found Online.

Brussels has just handed a genuine commercial gift to some of the smallest businesses in the country, and most of them will never collect it, because a search for their name returns almost nothing.

On 31 July, the EU's repair rules started to apply. I read the coverage when it landed. Nearly all of it was written for manufacturers, or written by firms hoping a manufacturer would ring them about a compliance programme. Very little of it was written for the person who actually fixes things for a living: the appliance engineer, the bike mechanic, the woman who replaces phone screens in the back of a shop, the fella who still rewinds motors. That person is the one this law pushes work towards. In my experience, they have a mobile number and a Facebook page.

What actually changed, minus the panic

The Directive on common rules promoting the repair of goods, number 2024/1799, applies from the end of July. Its central obligation, in Article 5, is that a manufacturer must repair on request, either free of charge or for a reasonable price, within a reasonable period from the time it has the item. It covers only goods for which EU law already sets repairability requirements, and those are listed in Annex II.

The list runs to ten categories: household washing machines and washer dryers, dishwashers, refrigerating appliances, electronic displays, welding equipment, vacuum cleaners, servers and data storage products, mobile phones, cordless phones and slate tablets, tumble dryers, and goods containing light means of transport batteries, which is the e-bike and scooter category. One detail most summaries skip, flagged by the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment: the rules apply to those goods bought after 31 July 2026, so the effect arrives gradually rather than all at once.

Read that list again if you run a workshop. Nothing on it is your problem.

If you are a repairer rather than a manufacturer, your compliance task from this Directive is short. It is empty. The Department says as much, describing independent repairers as supported by the Directive rather than newly burdened by it. Anyone offering to audit your repair shop for right to repair readiness is selling you a service with no underlying obligation attached to it.

The valuable part is a sentence buried in the recitals

Recital 23 explains why the law is shaped the way it is. Because consumers pay for repairs outside the guarantee period, the drafters expect them to compare options, and, in the Directive's own words, "it is likely they approach independent repairers in their proximity or the seller before reaching out to manufacturers which might for instance be located at a greater distance."

That is not a rule. It is a demand forecast written into European law, and every mechanism in the Directive is built to make it come true.

One of those mechanisms is a platform. Article 7 establishes a European online platform for repair so that consumers can find repairers, sellers of refurbished goods and community repair initiatives, with national platforms linked into it. In Ireland, the Department has said repairmystuff.ie will provide the basis for that national platform. It describes itself as Ireland's leading online repair directory, it is an initiative of local authorities, the Local Authority Waste Prevention Network, the Environmental Protection Agency and the repair industry, and it invites businesses to register for free.

A free listing on a directory that a government department has publicly named as the basis for the national platform. I have paid four figures for worse.

For a good while I got this wrong myself. We used to tell small service businesses that directories were a dead end and to put every euro into their own site. That was the right call about the pay to list directories that ring you every January. It was the wrong call about the ones a state body stands behind, and I was slow to see the difference.

What happens on the way from a listing to a booking

Now think about the journey that listing creates. Consider an appliance repairer in Kildare working out of a unit behind a hardware shop, good at the job, busy enough most months. A woman with a four year old tumble dryer searches the directory and gets three names within reach.

She has never heard of any of them. So she does the thing everybody does with an unfamiliar name. She types it into Google.

Two of the three have a page telling her the callout charge, the area they cover, the makes they handle and roughly what a heater element costs. The third has a mobile number and a Facebook page last touched in 2023. She books one of the first two. Or she gives up on the whole idea, rings the manufacturer's callout line, and pays whatever that costs. The repairer in the unit never learns the enquiry existed. There is no analytics dashboard for a decision made in somebody else's kitchen, and that is exactly why this leak goes unnoticed for years.

The EU has accidentally written your content brief

Article 4 of the Directive sets out the European Repair Information Form, a voluntary quote sheet a repairer may give a customer before any work is agreed. It has to be free, and the European Commission states that the conditions in it remain valid for 30 days. Nothing obliges you to use it.

Use the field list anyway, because as a specification for a web page it is close to perfect: who you are, the address you trade from, your phone number and email and any other way a customer can reach you quickly, the item, the defect and the repair you propose, the price or the way the price will be calculated along with a maximum, how long the repair will take, and whether a replacement is available while the customer waits.

Put that on a page and the woman with the dryer knows the callout charge, the likely range for the part, and whether she gets a loan machine, before she ever picks up the phone. Certainty is what wins that job. A number on its own asks her to gamble, which is why "call to book" is the most expensive line on most Irish service business websites.

The cost of publishing that page is not what it was. There is no agency brief and no six week wait: you can describe the business and have AI build the full WordPress site in under a minute, with Irish hosting, SSL, nightly backups and support included for sixty euro a year. Deploy it, verify the details read correctly on a phone, and get the listing pointed at it.

One caution on timing. A new site does not appear in search results the day you publish it, so expect a lag of weeks rather than days before the searches start finding you. That argues for starting now rather than next summer.

If you sell the things rather than fix them

A smaller piece of this does land on shops. The Directive amends the EU sale of goods rules that sit behind our Consumer Rights Act 2022. Before you provide a remedy for faulty goods, you now have to tell the customer they can choose between repair and replacement. If they choose repair, the seller's liability period extends once by 12 months.

That is two sentences on your returns page and one line in a staff briefing. While you are in there, if that page still carries wording that Irish consumer law does not allow you to publish, fix that first. It is the more urgent of the two jobs.

The honest limits

The platform is not finished. The Commission has until 31 July 2027 to build the common online interface, national platforms have to be compliant by the same date, and the full European platform is not expected to be operational until January 2028. A directory listing today is a trickle, not a flood. Anyone promising you a transformed order book this quarter is guessing.

A website will not make a repair cheaper than a replacement either, and price is the real competitor. The European Parliament cites a 2020 Eurobarometer finding that roughly three quarters of EU consumers would rather repair than replace. I would hold that number loosely. What people tell a survey and what they do standing in front of a wall of new dryers are different things, and the survey is six years old now.

Then the concession, and it is a real one. If you are a one van operation with a six week waiting list and no intention of hiring, a free directory profile and a well kept Google Business Profile genuinely cover you. You do not need a website to fill a diary that is already full. That is a legitimate way to run a trade. It is just a decision not to grow, and most of the repairers I talk to have the opposite complaint: a quiet February and no way of being found by anyone who has not already been given their name.

Conclusion

The rules that started in July ask nothing of the small repair business. What they change is who the customer thinks of first, and they lay a state backed road that brings her to the door.

Where that road ends is the part still under your control. A name and a mobile number is a road that ends in a field. Give her a page that answers her three questions, what it costs, how long it takes, and whether you can even fix her model, and a directory entry becomes a booked job.

The work is drifting back towards people who repair things. Deciding what a customer finds when she finally looks you up is the piece that belongs to you.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do the new right to repair rules mean my repair business has to fix things for free?

No. The obligation to repair in Directive (EU) 2024/1799 falls on manufacturers of the goods listed in Annex II, not on independent repairers. Article 5 requires those manufacturers to repair free of charge or for a reasonable price, within a reasonable time. If you are a repairer rather than a manufacturer, the Directive places no pricing obligation on you at all.

Which products are covered by the EU right to repair rules?

Annex II lists the goods that already carry EU repairability requirements: household washing machines and washer dryers, dishwashers, refrigerating appliances, electronic displays, welding equipment, vacuum cleaners, servers and data storage products, mobile phones, cordless phones and slate tablets, household tumble dryers, and goods containing light means of transport batteries such as e-bikes and scooters. The Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment notes the rules apply to those goods bought after 31 July 2026.

I run a small repair business. Do I have to do anything to comply?

Under this Directive, no. The duties sit with manufacturers, and to a small degree with sellers of goods. Independent repairers are supported by the Directive rather than regulated by it. Your existing obligations under Irish consumer law, on pricing information and on the service you provide, are unchanged.

What is the European Repair Information Form?

A standard quote sheet any repairer may choose to give a customer before repair work is agreed. It is voluntary, it must be provided free of charge, and the European Commission states the conditions set out in it remain valid for 30 days. Article 4 lists the contents: who you are, your trading address and contact details, the item, the defect and the repair proposed, the price or how it will be calculated together with a maximum, the time the repair will take, and whether a replacement is available while the customer waits.

How does a repair business get listed on Ireland's repair platform?

The Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment has said repairmystuff.ie will provide the basis for the national platform. It is an initiative of local authorities, the Local Authority Waste Prevention Network, the Environmental Protection Agency and the repair industry, and it invites businesses to register for free. The wider European platform is a longer project, with the Commission given until 31 July 2027 to build the common interface.

Does choosing repair extend a customer's guarantee?

Yes, once. The Directive amends the EU sale of goods rules behind the Consumer Rights Act 2022 so that where repair is the remedy used to bring goods into conformity, the seller's liability period is extended once by 12 months. That same amendment also requires a seller to tell the customer, before providing any remedy, that they can choose between repair and replacement.

Sources

EUR-Lex, Directive (EU) 2024/1799 on common rules promoting the repair of goods, including Article 4, Article 5, Article 7 and Annex II

European Commission, Directive on repair of goods, including the European Repair Information Form and the European online platform timeline

Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment, Right to Repair Directive

RepairMyStuff.ie, Ireland's online repair directory and free business registration

European Parliament, Right to repair: EU action to make repairs more attractive, citing the 2020 Eurobarometer survey