Right to Repair Laws by State: What's Actually Enforceable in 2026

"Right to repair" sounds like a single settled policy question with a single settled answer by now, given how long it's been in the news. It isn't — it's a state-by-state patchwork where the actual strength of the law depends heavily on which specific fights consumer advocates won and lost in each state's legislature, and those outcomes have varied dramatically. New York passed the first law and had it substantially weakened before the governor's signature made it real. Oregon passed a later one that held its ground against the same industry pressure and came out meaningfully stronger as a result.

Five States, Genuinely Different Laws

As of 2026, five states have enacted right-to-repair laws covering consumer electronics: New York (the Digital Fair Repair Act, 2022), California (SB 244, 2023), Minnesota (2023), Oregon (SB 1596, 2024), and Colorado (which has passed two separate right-to-repair laws, with its broader HB24-1121 taking effect January 1, 2026). Washington passed its own laws that took effect at the start of 2026 as well, covering both general consumer electronics and, notably, wheelchairs specifically — a category with its own well-documented repair-access problems given how dependent wheelchair users are on functioning equipment. All of these require manufacturers, in some form, to make repair parts, tools, and documentation available to independent repair shops and individual consumers, rather than restricting repair to the manufacturer's own authorized service network. The similarity mostly ends there — the specific exemptions, coverage dates, and enforcement teeth vary enough between these laws that "does my state have right to repair" is a meaningfully different question from "does my state's right-to-repair law actually cover the device and the problem I have."

New York's Law, Before and After the Governor's Pen

New York's Digital Fair Repair Act is worth examining in detail specifically because of what happened to it between passage and signature, which is a useful case study in how a right-to-repair bill can survive a legislature intact and still lose real substance before it becomes enforceable law. The bill passed the state legislature in June 2022 in a stronger form. Before Governor Kathy Hochul signed it in December 2022, her office negotiated a set of amendments after direct lobbying from Apple, Microsoft, and the industry group TechNet, which represents companies including Amazon and Google. The changes that made it into the final signed law include: manufacturers are not required to provide passwords or tools needed to bypass a device's security features; manufacturers can supply pre-assembled parts bundles rather than individual components whenever they determine the risk of improper installation "heightens the risk of injury" — a standard manufacturers themselves get to apply; enterprise electronics used by schools, hospitals, universities, and data centers are excluded entirely; and the law only applies to devices manufactured and sold after the law's effective date, meaning it doesn't help anyone trying to repair a device they already owned before the law existed.

Each of these specific carve-outs targets a different practical avenue manufacturers had previously used to make third-party repair difficult, and each remains legally available to them under the law as actually signed. The security-bypass exemption, for instance, means a manufacturer can still refuse to unlock whatever software authentication a specific replacement part requires, even while technically complying with the law's requirement to sell that same part.

Oregon's Law, and the Fight New York Didn't Win

Oregon's SB 1596, signed by Governor Tina Kotek in March 2024, took a direct run at exactly the kind of gap New York's law left open, by explicitly banning a specific manufacturer practice called parts pairing — where a device's software cryptographically links, or "pairs," a specific replacement component (a screen, a battery, a camera module) to the individual device it was originally installed in, such that even a genuine, authentic replacement part triggers software warnings, disabled features, or reduced functionality if it wasn't installed through the manufacturer's own authorized channel with its own pairing process. Apple, whose iPhones are widely cited as the most prominent real-world example of parts pairing in practice, lobbied against this specific provision, with an Apple representative testifying that the company uses parts pairing to make repair easier and to protect device security and user data. Oregon's legislature was not persuaded, passing the ban by an overwhelming margin. It applies to covered devices manufactured after January 1, 2025, making Oregon's law the first in the country to directly prohibit this specific practice rather than leaving it as an available workaround the way New York's law effectively does.

It's worth being precise about a detail that complicates any simple "industry versus consumers" framing of this whole fight: Apple did not oppose California's right-to-repair law the way it opposed Oregon's. Apple publicly supported California's SB 244 in 2023, a position that stood out enough at the time to draw its own coverage, given the company's more adversarial posture in other states. The difference wasn't a change of heart about repair generally — California's law, while a genuine, enforceable right-to-repair statute, doesn't include Oregon's specific parts-pairing ban. Apple's willingness to support one state's law while actively lobbying against another's, on the same general subject, tracks closely with exactly how strong each individual bill's specific provisions actually were — which is itself a useful signal for evaluating how much substance any given state's law actually has, beyond the fact that a right-to-repair law technically exists there at all.

Minnesota and Colorado, Filling In the Map

Minnesota's Right to Repair Act, passed in 2023, made it the first state outside the coasts to enact this kind of law, requiring manufacturers to make parts, tools, and repair documentation available to consumers and independent repair shops on terms at least as good as what's offered to the manufacturer's own authorized repair network. Colorado has gone further than most states by passing two separate right-to-repair statutes rather than one broad bill — an earlier one focused specifically on agricultural equipment (addressing a long-running, well-documented fight between farmers and manufacturers like John Deere over tractor repair software locks), and the broader HB24-1121, signed in May 2024 and effective January 1, 2026, covering a wide range of consumer electronics, appliances, HVAC equipment, and even e-bikes. That agricultural-equipment law is worth flagging on its own, since farm equipment repair access was one of the original, higher-profile flashpoints that helped build political momentum for the broader consumer-electronics right-to-repair movement well before New York's law made it a mainstream tech-news topic.

What "23 States Have Advanced Legislation" Actually Means

Advocacy trackers frequently cite a much larger number than five when describing right-to-repair's momentum — roughly 23 states have introduced or advanced some form of right-to-repair legislation since 2020. It's important to read that figure correctly: "advanced" in this context typically means a bill passed at least one legislative chamber, cleared a committee, or otherwise made meaningful procedural progress, not that it became enforceable law. The gap between 23 states showing legislative activity and 5 states with an actual signed, effective law is a genuinely large one, and it reflects how much industry lobbying resistance a right-to-repair bill typically faces at every stage between introduction and a governor's signature — resistance that, as New York's experience shows, doesn't necessarily disappear even after a bill has already passed both legislative chambers.

What to Actually Check Before Assuming You're Covered

Given how much variation exists between these five laws, the practically useful question for anyone trying to actually get a device repaired isn't "does my state have a right-to-repair law" but a more specific set of questions: does the law cover the specific type of device in question (some laws exclude certain categories like medical devices, motor vehicles, or enterprise equipment entirely); was the device manufactured after the law's effective date, since several of these laws apply only prospectively; and, if the issue involves a mismatched or third-party replacement part rather than simple access to parts and tools, does the state's law actually address parts pairing specifically, since only Oregon's currently does. A right-to-repair law existing in a given state is a necessary condition for enforceable repair access, on the evidence of how these five laws actually turned out — it has not, in any of these cases so far, been a sufficient one on its own.