Right to Repair: What the Law Actually Gives You, and Which State You're In

A cracked screen forces a decision, and the decision looks like arithmetic: repair, or replace. But two rules are quietly setting the terms, and they are not the same rule.

The first decides whether the part exists you would be buying. That is a state question, and the answer changed sharply between 2023 and 2026. The second decides whether repairing the device costs you the warranty. That is a federal question, and the answer has been the same since 1975 — but it is routinely misread, in both directions.

Get the order right and the arithmetic gets easier. So start here.

Two questions, in this order

Is the device covered by a state repair law? Nine states had enacted consumer-electronics repair laws as of October 2026, and each one has three cut-offs that decide whether your device is in scope: the state you are in, the date the product was first sold, and the product category. The same model can be covered in one state and not the next — New York reaches only equipment first sold or used on or after July 1, 2023, while Minnesota reaches equipment sold from July 1, 2021. And the category matters as much as the geography: a major home appliance is covered in California and Connecticut, and expressly excluded in New York and Texas.

Does repairing it put the warranty at risk? Almost never, and this part is national. The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act bars a manufacturer from conditioning your warranty on your using a part or service identified by brand name. A “warranty void if removed” sticker is the clause the Federal Trade Commission has been telling manufacturers to delete since 2018.

The two answers are independent, which is the part most advice gets wrong. A state repair law does not strengthen your warranty, and the warranty law does not get you a part. If your state has no repair law, you can still repair freely — you just cannot compel anyone to sell you a screen.

What federal law already gives you

The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, passed in 1975, is the load-bearing piece of American repair law, and it does exactly one thing: it limits what a warranty may require of you. Section 2302(c) says no warrantor may condition a written or implied warranty on your using any article or service identified by brand, trade or corporate name — with two narrow exceptions. The part or service is free under the warranty, or the FTC has granted a waiver. Section 2302(e) limits all of this to products that actually cost the consumer more than $5, which is to say both your laptop and your coffee maker.

The FTC’s march on this has moved in stages. In April 2018, its staff sent warning letters to six companies, identifying three kinds of clause it considered questionable. The agency’s own account does not name the recipients, but it does quote the language it objected to:

• a requirement that branded parts be used to keep the warranty intact;
• a term voiding coverage if the product is used with items the company does not sell or license;
• a provision voiding coverage if a warranty seal has been altered, defaced or removed.

Then came the report. Congress directed the FTC to study repair restrictions, and Nixing the Fix (May 2021) concluded there was “scant evidence” for the safety and security justifications manufacturers gave, and no empirical evidence that independent shops were more likely than authorized ones to expose customer data. In July 2021, the Commission adopted a policy statement committing itself to enforcement, and asked the public to report violations. In 2022 it followed through: orders against Harley-Davidson, the maker of Westinghouse generators MWE Investments, and the grill maker Weber-Stephen, whose warranties had conveyed that coverage would be void if customers used independent repairers or third-party parts. Each order required language along the lines of “using third-party parts will not void this warranty.” The penalty ceiling for violating those orders was stated at the time as up to $46,517 per violation — an inflation-adjusted figure that changes, so treat it as an order of magnitude, not a promise.

The federal rule has a boundary, and it is the one readers trip over. A manufacturer may still deny a specific warranty claim if it shows the third-party part or the independent repair caused that failure. The difference is between “we will not cover your cracked screen because you used a third-party battery” — which is not allowed — and “we will not cover the screen because the third-party battery you installed leaked into it,” which is.

What a state repair law actually adds

Every consumer-electronics repair law on the books follows one template: a manufacturer that supplies parts, tools and documentation to its own authorized network must make the same things available to owners and independent repairers on “fair and reasonable terms.” Three details separate them, and all three matter to a buyer:

• Documentation and diagnostic tools carry no fee in New York, California, Oregon and Connecticut — you pay only the actual cost of a printed copy or a shipped tool. This is what makes an independent repair possible at all: the fault-code reader is often the difference between a $60 diagnosis and replacing parts until one of them works.
• Some laws put a floor under parts availability; all of them cap it at what the manufacturer still supplies. California’s floor is the longest: parts, tools and documentation for at least three years after the last manufacture date for products with a wholesale price of $50 to $99.99, and at least seven years at $100 or more — expressly regardless of whether the warranty ran longer. Connecticut runs three and five years on the same price split. And the ceiling is general: Oregon, California and Washington all state that the duty does not reach a part the manufacturer no longer makes or no longer provides to its own authorized network.
• The coverage cut-off is usually a sale date, not a purchase date. Minnesota covers equipment sold on or after July 1, 2021; New York covers equipment first sold or used on or after July 1, 2023; Colorado and Washington cover products first sold or used on or after July 1, 2021; Connecticut reaches only devices first manufactured and first sold or used on or after July 1, 2026. Buying an older model does not pull it into a newer law. Texas draws the line differently — by wholesale price (at least $50) rather than by date.

State	When it starts	What it covers	Parts-pairing rule
New York	In force for equipment first sold or used on or after July 1, 2023	Digital electronic equipment, excluding major appliances, alarm systems, vehicles, medical devices, consoles	None
Minnesota	Effective July 1, 2024	Equipment sold on or after July 1, 2021, excluding vehicles, medical devices, off-road equipment, consoles	None
California	Operative July 1, 2024	Products first sold or used on or after July 1, 2021, excluding alarm systems and consoles; parts floor of 3 or 7 years	None
Oregon	In force; parts-pairing rule keyed to equipment first made and sold after January 1, 2025	Consumer electronics sold or in use in the state; cell phones made before July 1, 2021 and other devices before July 1, 2015 excluded	Yes, for equipment first made and sold after January 1, 2025
Colorado	Effective January 1, 2026	Equipment first sold or used on or after July 1, 2021; broad exemptions including vehicles, aviation, marine, certain safety and energy equipment, consoles	Yes, for equipment first made and sold after January 1, 2026
Washington	Obligations begin January 1, 2026	Products first sold or used on or after July 1, 2021	Yes, for products first made and sold after January 1, 2026
Connecticut	Effective July 1, 2026	Products first manufactured and first sold or used on or after July 1, 2026: electronics, major home appliances, antennas; parts floor of 3 or 5 years	None
Texas	Effective September 1, 2026	Digital electronic equipment sold to a consumer in Texas with a wholesale price of at least $50; appliances, medical devices, safety equipment and consoles excluded	None
Kansas	Applies from July 1, 2027	Equipment made available for sale on or after July 1, 2027	None

Two features of that table are worth naming out loud. Almost every law keys coverage to when the product was sold, so a law that takes effect in 2026 mostly protects the 2026 models — not the phone in your pocket today. And these laws are enforced by the state attorney general, not by an individual consumer’s suit. Oregon’s, for instance, lets the attorney general seek up to $1,000 a day per violation — but only for violations occurring on or after July 1, 2027, which means the teeth arrive two years after the duty.

The loophole: parts pairing

Here is the failure mode that the first generation of laws did not foresee. A manufacturer can comply completely — publish the manual, stock the part at dealer prices — and still make the repair fail, because the device’s software refuses to recognize the new component.

That practice is called parts pairing: software that links a component to one specific device through a serial number or a cryptographic check. Oregon’s statute defines it as “a manufacturer’s practice of using software to identify component parts through a unique identifier.” In practice it shows up as a persistent warning about an unidentified part, as the loss of a feature such as battery health, or as the part simply not working.

Three states now restrict it: Oregon, Colorado and Washington, each with carve-outs. Washington and Colorado both permit parts pairing for stand-alone biometric components used for authentication; Oregon allows reduced battery functionality after a thermal event. Everywhere else, the part is legal to sell and the software may still refuse it.

This is the axis to watch, because it decides whether a repair law has any effect. It is also why the FTC’s July 2026 antitrust settlement with Deere & Company, joined by Illinois, Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, reads the way it does. Deere must give farmers and independent shops the same resources as its dealers for ten years, and the list is specific: reading and clearing fault codes, reprogramming and pairing new electronic components, restarting a machine after an emissions-related shutdown, and technical manuals. Pairing was the thing the order had to name.

The repair-or-replace arithmetic

With the law settled, the decision is a comparison between two numbers. The mistake is using the sticker price of the new device as the second one.

Net replacement cost is the price of the equivalent new device minus what the broken one is worth to somebody — a trade-in credit, a buyback, or a sale for parts. A device with a cracked screen still has value.

Then apply a rough line: repair if the quote is well under half of net replacement cost, replace if it is over.

Worked example. A three-year-old phone, $799 for the current equivalent, $150 trade-in credit on the broken unit, so net replacement is $649. A $249 repair is 38 percent of that — repair it. A $450 quote is 69 percent — at that point you are buying a used phone’s worth of remaining life at new-phone prices, and replacement wins.

Two corrections to the formula, both of which favor repair:

• Add the parts clock. If the device is still inside a state parts window — seven years in California, five in Connecticut — the manufacturer has to keep supplying the part, which caps what independent shops can charge. If the window has closed, a “repair” today may be the last one available.
• Do not count a warranty extension you cannot use. In the European Union, choosing repair now extends the legal guarantee by a year. No US state offers that; a manufacturer’s extended warranty is a separate purchase with its own terms.

When the manufacturer says no

Documentation is the whole game, because the federal protection only bites if you can show what happened. Concretely:

1. Put the parts request in writing and keep the dated copy. Under a state repair law this starts the record; under federal law it establishes that the refusal was a policy, not an accident.
2. If a warranty claim is denied, ask for the reason in writing. The manufacturer has to point to a defect or damage the third-party part or work caused — not to the mere fact that you went elsewhere.
3. Report it. If you were told your warranty would be void for using an independent shop or third-party parts, the FTC asks you to report it at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. State repair laws are enforced by the state attorney general, and Minnesota’s publishes a route for exactly this.

What is not covered

Categories sit outside these laws by design, and the pattern is consistent enough to be useful. Video game consoles are excluded almost everywhere, generally on the reasoning that federal rules for the platforms conflict. Major home appliances are excluded in New York and Texas, and expressly included in California and Connecticut — the single biggest state-to-state difference in what “right to repair” means. Motor vehicles are excluded from all of them; access to vehicle diagnostic and repair information is handled by separate state statutes, such as Massachusetts’s right-to-repair law at Chapter 93K. Medical devices are excluded too, except powered wheelchairs, which a few states have carved out separately.

What Europe did differently

Worth knowing if you buy internationally, because the models diverge. Directive (EU) 2024/1799, which had to be written into national law by 31 July 2026, does not mainly hand you parts. It obliges producers to perform the repair on covered goods when asked, free of charge or at a reasonable price — and it extends the legal guarantee by a year where the consumer chooses repair over replacement. US state laws create a supply obligation; the EU creates a service obligation. Neither is a superset of the other.

And the federal picture in the US? Congress has not passed a consumer-electronics repair law. A Fair Repair Act, H.R. 7404, was introduced on February 5, 2026 and referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which is where it sits. The design that exists is state-level, and it is still being written.

The bottom line

For a device you already own: repair it if you want to — the federal warranty rule protects that choice nationwide, provided you keep the paperwork and can show the damage was not caused by the repair. If you need a part and your state has no repair law, that is the one thing you cannot compel, so ask for a written quote and a written parts list before you commit.

For a device you are about to buy: the coverage date is the sale date. A law that takes effect in 2026 makes the 2026 models repairable, not last year’s. If long service life is the point of the purchase, the two questions worth asking are whether your state covers the category, and whether the manufacturer pairs parts — because a part you can buy and the software will not accept is not a repair.

Byte is the technology site of the Omni Mundi Compendium network. How the credit-file tools differ, and which one to use after a breach, is covered in Credit Freeze, Fraud Alert, or Credit Lock and What to Do After a Data Breach Notice; the underlying privacy patchwork is in What US Privacy Law Actually Protects.

This article is general information about consumer repair rights, not legal advice, and it does not cover a specific contract or dispute. State law varies, and the dates and thresholds above should be checked against your own state’s statute. It is AI-written and independently AI-reviewed before publication; the review standard and this article’s findings are recorded in the network’s editorial review log.