Does the EU Right to Repair Directive cover your printer?

The short answer: printers are not on the list

Directive (EU) 2024/1799, the Right to Repair Directive, applies from 31 July 2026, and printers are not among the products it covers. Its repair obligation does not apply to everything you own. It applies to a specific list in Annex II, and that list is built from products that already carry EU repairability requirements under separate ecodesign rules.

Annex II covers washing machines and washer dryers, dishwashers, refrigerators, electronic displays, welding equipment, servers and data storage, mobile phones, cordless phones and tablets, and tumble dryers. Batteries for e-bikes and e-scooters join from February 2027. Printers, scanners and multifunction devices are absent, and so are their cartridges.

If you have read that the new law forces manufacturers to repair your printer or to stop blocking cartridges, that is not what it says.

What the directive does change

For the products it covers, it turns repair from a favour into an obligation. Manufacturers must repair on request at a reasonable price and within a reasonable time, including after the legal guarantee has expired, and they cannot use contract terms, hardware techniques or software to block the use of independent repairers or second hand and 3D printed spare parts.

Two further points matter for consumers generally, not only for the listed products. Choosing repair instead of replacement inside the legal guarantee extends that guarantee by twelve months. And each member state has to run a national online platform where you can find repairers and refurbished goods.

Spain is transposing it through the Sustainable Consumption Bill

Spain has not finished transposing the directive. The instrument is the draft Sustainable Consumption Act, published for public consultation by the Ministry of Social Rights, Consumer Affairs and Agenda 2030, with the consultation window running to the end of August 2026. It carries both Directive 2024/1799 on the right to repair and Directive 2024/825 on empowering consumers for the green transition.

Under the published timetable, the provisions on guarantees, repair and after sales service take effect on 31 July 2026, while the changes to precontractual information and labelling follow on 27 September 2026.

The practical consequence is that during 2026 the directive is in application while the national text that will enforce it is still going through the legislative process. If you are asserting a repair right in Spain this year, the reference point is the directive and existing consumer law rather than a finished national statute.

What this means if your printer rejects a cartridge

The right to repair is not the rule that helps when a firmware update locks out a cartridge. Consumer guarantee law and competition law are the rules that do. A printer that refuses a third party cartridge is not a repair problem, so nothing in Annex II helps you.

What does apply is your legal guarantee, which sits with the seller and cannot be signed away, and the principle that a manufacturer must connect a specific fault to a specific third party part before rejecting a claim. It is not enough to observe that a compatible cartridge was fitted.

There is also a live commitment on the record from HP. Settling litigation over firmware that blocked non HP supplies, HP agreed to keep disclosing its use of Dynamic Security and to keep giving printer users the option to install or decline firmware updates that include it. That is a documented commitment you can point to, and it is more useful in practice than the repair directive.

Our guides go into what to do at the machine: HP Dynamic Security and the European legal position, and what to do when your printer rejects a compatible cartridge.

What is and is not coming for cartridges

Printer consumables are being studied, but they are not in the current ecodesign priority list. The Commission published its first Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation working plan for 2025 to 2030 in April 2025. The priority final products are textiles and apparel, furniture, tyres and mattresses, with iron, steel and aluminium as intermediate products, alongside energy related products carried over such as displays, washing machines and tumble dryers.

Imaging equipment and consumables, which is the product group that covers printers, copiers, multifunction devices and cartridges, has its own preparatory study at the Commission Joint Research Centre. That work is real and it explicitly includes cartridges and containers. What it is not, yet, is a scheduled delegated act with dates attached.

The honest summary for a buyer in 2026: expect no near term EU rule that forces printer makers to stop locking cartridges. Plan around the products and the suppliers, not around a regulation that has not been written.