Right to Repair Has Reached All 50 States. Now Comes the Hard Part.

Eleven years after a single bill was filed in South Dakota, the right to repair movement hit a milestone that once looked impossible. With the introduction of a new bill in Wisconsin, right to repair legislation has now been introduced in every single US state, according to an announcement from iFixit this week. The map, in the words of Repair.org's executive director Gay Gordon-Byrne, no longer has any blanks.

It is a remarkable arc for a campaign that began with repair shops, farmers, and tinkerers arguing a simple proposition: if you bought it, you should be able to fix it. But the milestone is a beginning as much as an ending. Getting bills introduced is not the same as getting them passed, and the gap between the two is where the next fight is already happening.

The last domino

Wisconsin's new bill made it the fiftieth state to file right to repair legislation, completing a sweep that iFixit, Repair.org, and the public interest network PIRG have been tracking together. This year alone, legislation is active in 24 states, a sign that the issue has moved from the fringe of consumer policy to the mainstream of statehouse agendas.

The movement's roots are agrarian as much as electronic. Farmers have been at the center of the fight from the start, pushing for access to the diagnostic tools, software, and parts needed to fix tractors and combines that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. When a tractor dies in the middle of harvest, waiting weeks for a dealership technician to plug in a proprietary laptop is not a theoretical inconvenience, it is a crop at risk. That urgency is why agriculture-focused bills have been among the most bipartisan, and why Wisconsin, a dairy and farm equipment state, is a fitting last domino.

Eleven years after a single bill was filed in South Dakota, right to repair legislation has now been introduced in every US state. The map no longer has any blanks.

What the map looks like now

Five states have passed electronics right to repair legislation: New York, California, Minnesota, Oregon, and Colorado. That means roughly one in five Americans lives in a state with a passed right to repair law, according to iFixit's tally, while the rest are covered by bills at various stages of the legislative process.

The wins have been substantive. Oregon's law took aim at parts pairing, the practice of locking components to a specific device through software so that even a genuine replacement part refuses to work without the manufacturer's blessing. Colorado's electronics bill covers anything with a chip, with few exceptions, and even extends to enterprise equipment like data center servers. Minnesota's law drew national attention for the breadth of its requirements on parts, tools, and documentation.

And the political dynamics have shifted. Google is now a major supporter of right to repair legislation in the US, and even Apple has come on board to support some bills, a reversal from the era when manufacturers told legislators that sharing repair information would endanger customers and expose trade secrets. iFixit and its partners spent years countering those claims with repair professionals, surveys, and repairability data, and the message that landed is disarmingly simple: people are fed up with disposable products and locked-down devices.

Why introduction is not victory

Here is the sobering context behind the celebration. Of the fifty states with bills on the books, only a handful have turned introduction into law, and many bills die quietly in committee every session. Wisconsin's own earlier agricultural repair bills, SB 148 and AB 147, were referred to committee in 2025 and failed to pass in the 2026 session. Introduction gets you on the map; it does not guarantee momentum.

The next frontier is the fine print. A law that requires parts and manuals to be available but leaves pricing and software locks untouched can be hollowed out in practice. That is why advocates are pushing for explicit bans on parts pairing, following Oregon's lead, and why some states are going further: Colorado's legislature passed a resolution this year calling on the Federal Trade Commission to create a repairability scoring system, so consumers can see how fixable a product is before they buy it.

There is also the international angle. The European Union's right to repair directive (2024/1799) applied from July 31, 2026, obliging manufacturers to repair covered products within a reasonable time and for a reasonable price, and prohibiting hardware, software, and contractual barriers to repair unless justified by legitimate and objective factors. Europe's rules create global design pressure: a manufacturer that retools to comply in the EU has less incentive to keep selling unfixable hardware in the US.

What comes next

The realistic trajectory is uneven progress. More states will likely pass laws in the next few legislative cycles, especially ones modeled on Oregon's parts-pairing ban and Colorado's broad coverage. Enforcement will be the proving ground: laws are only as strong as the state attorneys general and consumer agencies willing to act on them, and manufacturers are adept at finding the gray areas in phrases like "reasonable price."

But the symbolism of the fifty-state sweep matters. A decade ago, manufacturers told legislators there was no problem to solve. Today, every state in the union has a legislator willing to file a bill saying there is. The fight has moved from "should people be able to fix things" to "how exactly do we make sure they can." That is a fundamentally different, and much more winnable, conversation.

"Repair is the future, and this moment proves it," iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens said of the milestone. The future part is still being written, state by state, in committee rooms and hearing halls. The blank map is full. Now the laws have to catch up to it.