On June 25, 2026, Germany's Bundestag passed the national law transposing EU Directive 2024/1799 — the Right to Repair Directive — into German law. CDU/CSU, SPD, and the Greens voted in favour; the AfD and Die Linke opposed it. The vote puts Germany on track to meet the EU-wide implementation deadline of July 31, 2026, at which point smartphone and tablet manufacturers operating across EU member states will be legally obligated to offer consumers affordable post-warranty repairs. Switzerland, sharing borders with Germany, France, Austria, and Liechtenstein, has no equivalent law on the books.
The gap is not new — Switzerland routinely declines to auto-adopt EU consumer law, and for sound constitutional reasons. But the July 31 deadline makes the divergence concrete and consequential.
What the Directive Actually Grants
Directive (EU) 2024/1799 was passed by the European Parliament with a 584-to-3 majority in April 2024 and formally adopted in June 2024, with member states required to transpose it by July 31, 2026. Its Annex II product list covers smartphones, tablets, electronic displays, washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and servers — products already subject to EU ecodesign repairability standards.
For each covered category, manufacturers must:
- Repair products "within a reasonable time and for a reasonable price" once the standard warranty expires
- Supply spare parts, tools, and technical documentation to independent repairers at prices that "should not deter repair"
- Refrain from using software, firmware, or hardware measures designed to obstruct repairs
- Publish indicative repair pricing on publicly accessible websites
- Extend the legal guarantee by 12 months when a consumer chooses repair over replacement
- Provide a standardised European Repair Information Form before work begins
The directive builds on existing ecodesign rules that already require manufacturers to design repairability into products. The new law adds the commercial obligation: manufacturers cannot design for repairability and then price repairs out of reach. According to the European Parliament, premature disposal of consumer goods generates 261 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent annually and costs EU consumers roughly €12 billion per year in avoidable replacement spending. The directive is projected to generate €4.8 billion in EU economic growth by unlocking a professional repair market that currently has no guaranteed access to manufacturer spare parts.
Germany's transposition integrates these rights into the Civil Code (BGB), treats repairability as a component of legally customary product quality, and imposes the spare-parts access obligation on manufacturers operating in the German market. The law was criticised by some advocates for leaving "reasonable prices" undefined, making enforcement of the cost standard potentially difficult — but the structural shift is real.
Switzerland's Current Framework
Swiss consumers are not without protection. The Code of Obligations provides a two-year statutory warranty on movable goods, during which sellers must repair or replace defective products. The Act against Unfair Competition prohibits deceptive commercial practices, and the Product Liability Act covers physical harm from defective goods.
What Switzerland lacks is anything comparable to a post-warranty repair right. Once the two-year period lapses, Swiss manufacturers face no statutory obligation to repair devices, supply spare parts to third parties at non-deterrent prices, or publish repair costs. A Swiss consumer whose four-year-old smartphone develops a battery fault has no legal claim to an affordable manufacturer repair — and independent repair shops may be locked out of the spare-parts ecosystem entirely.
The January 2026 reform to the Code of Obligations, which drew significant attention, addressed only construction defects in buildings — a mandatory right to rectify building faults, with a 60-day notice period and a five-year limitation period. It has no bearing on consumer electronics.
The Case for Switzerland Acting — and the Counterargument
The strongest argument for Swiss alignment is market coherence. Swiss consumers buy the same smartphones as German and French consumers, from the same manufacturers. Those devices are designed globally to meet EU ecodesign standards — they are physically repairable. What Swiss consumers lack is the legal lever to demand repair at a reasonable price.
A proportionate Swiss ordinance — applying the EU's Annex II product list, mandating spare-parts access at non-deterrent prices, and prohibiting software-based repair locks — would close the practical gap without replicating the EU's full institutional architecture. Switzerland has done exactly this kind of calibrated alignment before with product safety and energy efficiency rules.
The counterargument deserves fair hearing. Switzerland's bilateral relationship with the EU is under active renegotiation, and piecemeal adoption of individual directives risks creating a mismatched compliance patchwork. Critics argue the Code of Obligations already provides adequate basic protection, and that Swiss electronics importers — smaller in scale than their EU counterparts — would bear disproportionate compliance costs without the scale benefits of operating across 27 member states. These are real constraints, not pretexts; they point toward the design of Swiss legislation, not its absence.
The Growing De Facto Gap
The Swiss Federal Council and SECO have not publicly proposed a Right to Repair bill for digital goods. Advocacy organisations like RechtaufReparatur.ch have campaigned for minimum design requirements on smartphones and laptops, but no binding legislative timeline exists.
July 31 is not a cliff edge. Manufacturers will not overnight pull service from Switzerland. But as EU repair infrastructure scales — independent repairers gaining legal certainty over spare-parts access, a European Repair Platform scheduled for 2027, consumer demand for post-warranty service normalising — the de facto repair gap between Swiss and EU consumers will widen over time. Swiss independent repairers, operating without legal spare-parts access guarantees, will find themselves structurally disadvantaged relative to their EU counterparts. The longer Bern waits, the more catching up it will eventually have to do.