US Right to Repair by State: the 7 Laws and the Sale Dates That Decide Coverage

Last checked: 4 September 2026.

Seven US states now have a general right-to-repair law for consumer electronics, and the newest one — Texas — took effect three days ago, on 1 September 2026. But the state on the customer’s driver’s licence is not what decides whether you can demand a schematic and a part: the date the device was first sold is, and those cutoff dates run from July 2015 in Oregon to September 2026 in Texas.

That is the whole practical difference, and it is buried in a definition section in every one of the seven acts. Below is every law read from its official text, with the two dates that matter kept apart: the date the manufacturer’s duty switched on, and the oldest device that duty can reach.

The tracker

How to use it at the counter

Four questions, in this order, and only the fourth one is about the state’s politics.

1. When was this unit first sold? A 2019 ThinkPad is inside the law in Oregon and outside it in the other six. A phone bought new in 2022 is covered in Oregon, Minnesota, California, Colorado and Washington, and not in New York or Texas. This single question kills most claims.
2. Is the category carved out? Game consoles are excluded in all seven states — every one of them defines “video game console” specifically to push it out, and every one of them says a laptop or a phone that happens to run games is not a console. Home appliances with embedded electronics are out in New York and Texas and in nobody else’s law.
3. What are you actually asking for? Documentation and tools have to be free in most of these acts; parts only have to be sold on fair and reasonable terms. Nobody has to hand over source code, and nobody has to give you anything that defeats an owner-set anti-theft lock.
4. Is pairing in play? That is a separate rule with a separate, later date. See below.

For everything the parallel European regime demands — and it demands very different things, mostly at board-assembly level — see our companion piece on the EU right to repair rules in force since 31 July 2026.

The part nobody covers

1. The pairing ban always starts later than the law

Three states ban parts pairing, and in all three the ban has its own cutoff that is newer than the documentation duty. Colorado and Washington oblige manufacturers to supply parts for gear sold since July 2021, but only forbid pairing on gear first made and sold after 1 January 2026. Oregon’s pairing ban starts at 1 January 2025 while its supply duty reaches back a decade further. The practical consequence: for most of the hardware currently on your bench, you can demand the part and the manufacturer can still refuse to let the device accept it.

All three carry the same carve-out, word for word: pairing stays legal for “stand-alone biometric components used for authentication purposes … which are not bundled in commonly replaced parts, such as a device’s screen, keyboard, ports, or battery.” That last clause is the useful one. Fingerprint sensor on its own: pairing allowed. Fingerprint sensor welded into the assembly you replace anyway: not allowed.

Texas went the other way and wrote the opposite into statute. Chapter 121 says nothing in it “prevents an original equipment manufacturer from … requiring remote authorization or an Internet connection before an independent repair provider or owner may use a part or tool.” The newest US right-to-repair law is the first one to legalise the thing the other laws were written to stop. Texas also lets a pre-existing OEM/authorised-provider contract override the chapter outright.

2. Oregon asks for your certificate

Oregon’s act is the strongest on paper and the strangest in the details. Its definition of “independent repair provider” requires that the person “possesses a valid and unexpired certification” — it names WISE, CompTIA A+ and the National Appliance Service Technician Certification as examples. No other state gates the right behind a credential. If you repair in Oregon, your A+ card is not a nice-to-have; it is the thing that makes you a party to the statute.

Two more Oregon quirks worth knowing. Its definition of covered equipment requires that the product be “sold, used or supplied in this state one year or more after the product was first manufactured” — so the newest release gets roughly a year of grace before it becomes covered at all. And section 7 of the act says the Attorney General’s investigative-demand power “applies to violations … that occur on or after July 1, 2027”. The obligations have been live since January 2025; the enforcement machinery behind them switches on in mid-2027.

3. California measures from the factory, not from the sale

California is the only one of the seven that sets a duration rather than a cutoff. Manufacturers must supply documentation, parts and tools for three years after the last date a model was manufactured if its wholesale price was $50–$99.99, and seven years if it was $100 or more — explicitly “regardless of whether the seven-year period exceeds the warranty period.” The clock starts when the production line stops, which means a long-lived model quietly extends its own support window.

California is also the only state where you are not dependent on one Attorney General’s appetite: a city, a county, a district attorney or the state can sue, and the penalties are $1,000 per day for a first violation, $2,000 for a second and $5,000 for a third. Everywhere else, enforcement is the AG alone, and both New York and Texas give the manufacturer a cure period before anything happens.

The oddities in the exclusion lists

The carve-outs are where the lobbying shows. Oregon’s list of things that are not consumer electronic equipment ends with “(E) Electric toothbrushes.” Washington exempts “low earth orbit broadband equipment manufactured before 2044” — a satellite-internet carve-out with a twenty-year fuse — and also exempts any “product that has never been available for retail sale to a consumer”, which quietly removes enterprise-only hardware. Colorado exempts power tools, portable generators and energy storage, plus set-top boxes, modems and routers if the service provider swaps them free of charge. New York is the only state that excludes e-bike manufacturers by name.

Limits, and the mistakes worth avoiding

None of these laws is a component-level law. They all speak in parts, tools and documentation as the manufacturer defines them for its own authorised network — if the OEM’s authorised channel only ever receives a whole display assembly, that is what you are entitled to buy. Nothing here obliges anyone to publish a schematic at net level, sell you an EEPROM, or explain a power rail; that is still work you do from datasheets and boardviews, which is why reading a schematic and boardview is not going obsolete. The same gap shows up on smaller jobs: nobody owes you the contents of a monitor’s EDID EEPROM, and no statute mentions clipping a SOIC-8 flash chip.

Three errors we keep seeing in forum threads. First, treating “my state has right to repair” as the end of the analysis — the sale date decides it, and in New York and Texas that date is very recent. Second, assuming the pairing ban applies to the whole covered fleet; it does not, it applies to a newer slice. Third, expecting to sue: only California’s law lets anyone but the state Attorney General bring an action, and Texas explicitly forecloses a private right of action. Your realistic lever is a written request, a documented refusal, and a complaint to the AG’s consumer protection division.

Other states have narrower laws on the books — powered wheelchairs, agricultural equipment, automotive telematics — which are real rights but not the ones that touch a general electronics bench. This tracker stays to the seven general consumer-electronics acts, and we will update it as the 2027 session bills land.

Sources

• New York: General Business Law §399-nn (Digital Fair Repair Act, ch. 800 of 2022)
• Minnesota: Minn. Stat. §325E.72
• California: SB 244, adding Public Resources Code §§42488–42488.3
• Oregon: Oregon Laws 2024, chapter 69 (SB 1596)
• Colorado: HB24-1121, final act (amending CRS 6-1-1502 et seq.)
• Washington: Chapter 353, Laws of 2025 (ESHB 1483)
• Texas: HB 2963, enrolled — Business & Commerce Code ch. 121

Every date and quotation above was read from the official act or statute text linked here, not from a summary. If a state amends one of these — and Colorado has already amended its own once — the amendment is what governs, so check the act that amends before quoting a parts list.