How Often a Broken Thing Is Fixed

The numbers exist, and they are not flattering

The short version: most broken consumer electronics are replaced rather than repaired. The European Environment Agency and national statistics gathered under the EU's Ecodesign framework consistently find that repair rates for small household electronics — phones, tablets, small appliances — hover between 15 and 35 percent depending on product category and country. Larger items like washing machines do better; a phone rarely does. The data is not soft opinion polling. Several EU member states now collect it under legal obligations introduced by the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, which gives researchers a baseline that did not exist a decade ago.

The reasons consumers give when they decline to repair are recorded too, and they cluster around three things: cost, parts and time. A 2021 survey conducted across EU member states by the European Commission found that cost was the dominant barrier — specifically, that repair quotes routinely exceed half the replacement price of the device. Parts availability was the second factor. Time — the friction of getting a device diagnosed, quoted and returned — was the third. What was notably absent from the top responses was indifference to repair itself. Most people, when asked, say they would rather fix than discard; they simply find that the practical path is blocked ↗.

What blocks the path

A device that requires an active vendor server to authenticate, configure or simply function presents a repair problem that no technician can solve with a screwdriver.

The cost barrier is not accidental. A repair quote is expensive partly because labour markets price skilled technicians at rates set by other skilled trades, but also because parts are expensive where they exist and unavailable where they do not. iFixit, which has tracked parts availability and repairability scoring across product generations, has documented consistent trends: flagship smartphones become harder to open each generation, with adhesive replacing screws and serialised components adding a software rejection layer on top of the physical one. A screen that fits may still fail a system check — what is called parts pairing — which means a genuine replacement part sourced outside the manufacturer's supply chain can be rejected by the device's own firmware. The practical effect is that independent repair shops either pay manufacturer prices or cannot complete the job.

Time compounds the cost problem. Consumer research in the UK and Germany has found that the median time from fault to completed third-party repair is measured in days to weeks, against same-day replacement available at any retailer. For a device that is also a communication tool — a phone, a tablet — that gap is not trivial. Manufacturers with in-house repair services can move faster, but their pricing removes the financial case for repair when the device is more than two or three years old.

Network dependency adds a layer the older repair literature did not anticipate. A device that requires an active vendor server to authenticate, configure or simply function presents a repair problem that no technician can solve with a screwdriver. If the server has been discontinued — as happened when Nest shut down the Revolv hub's service in 2016 after acquiring the company — the device is non-functional regardless of its physical condition. The repair rate for a bricked tethered device is, definitionally, zero.

Where repair actually happens

The repair that does happen is concentrated in a few places: professional independent shops in cities, self-repair by technically confident owners, and community repair cafés, which are now formally counted in several European national statistics. The Right to Repair movement — which has produced enforceable legislation in the EU since 2021 — has improved parts access for a defined list of categories: washing machines, dishwashers, televisions, some power tools. Smartphones arrived later and with narrower obligations. The categories where repair rates are lowest — small electronics, wearables, smart-home devices — are largely still outside the scope of the strongest rules.

The pattern that emerges from the data is not that consumers have abandoned repair as a value. They have found, repeatedly, that the systems around the device make repair slower, more expensive and less certain of success than buying new. Changing that outcome requires changing those systems: parts supply, software policy, and the dependency on infrastructure the owner does not control. The numbers will not shift until the conditions do.