France Will Pay Part of Your Repair Bill
Bring an out-of-warranty appliance to a certified repairer in France and the government-backed scheme knocks money off your invoice on the spot. €25 off a washing machine repair. €50 off a laptop. Up to €60 for the big structural fixes. You don't apply for anything. The discount just appears on the quote.
That's the bonus réparation, launched in December 2022 under France's anti-waste law. It started with about 30 product categories and has grown to 73, from smartphones and dishwashers to electric bikes.
And people use it. Supported repairs hit 1.3 million in 2024, and ADEME, the French environment agency running the scheme, is aiming for 12 million cumulative repairs by 2027.
The logic is the same one we built Sundr on: a lot of stuff gets thrown away not because repair is impossible, but because the repair quote is just close enough to the replacement price that people give up. Shave €25 to €60 off that quote and the maths flips for a lot of devices.
How Much Do You Get?
Amounts are fixed per product type, not a percentage. In practice they cover roughly 20% of a typical repair bill. The 2026 amounts for common devices:
- Smartphone: €25, rising to €50 for a motherboard repair
- Laptop: €50
- Washing machine: €25, or €50 for motor and drum bearing repairs
- Dishwasher: €25, or €50 for the drain pump or electronic board
- Fridge or freezer: €30, or €60 for compressor and refrigerant work
- TV: €30, or €60 for the motherboard or screen
- Tumble dryer: €25, or €50 for the heating element or heat pump
- Electric bike: €45, or €90 for battery and motor repairs
- Coffee maker, microwave, vacuum: €15 each
The doubled amounts for structural repairs arrived in January 2024, aimed at exactly the failures that usually trigger a "just replace it" decision. A compressor or a drum bearing is the expensive, device-killing fix, so that's where the subsidy is biggest.
Amounts change roughly yearly. The current list lives on ecosystem.eco, the eco-organisation that administers most of the scheme. Figures above verified August 2026 via service-public.gouv.fr and the 2026 scheme summaries.
How Do You Actually Claim It?
You don't, really. That's the clever part.
Three conditions have to be true:
1. Your device is on the list. 73 categories in 2026. Most household electronics and appliances qualify.
2. It's out of warranty. The bonus targets the repairs you'd otherwise pay for entirely yourself. Inside the legal warranty period (two years in France), the repair is the seller's problem anyway.
3. The repairer is QualiRépar certified. That's the label ADEME created for the scheme. Nearly 6,000 repairers carried it as of mid-2026, searchable on ecosystem.eco.
Meet all three and the bonus is deducted from your quote and invoice automatically. The repairer claims the money back from the eco-organisation. The customer fills out nothing.
That design choice matters more than it looks. Rebate schemes with claim forms have notoriously low uptake. Making the discount appear at the till, with the admin pushed onto the professional, is a big reason usage went from a slow start in 2023 to 1.3 million repairs in 2024.
Clothes and Shoes Count Too
A separate branch of the same policy covers textiles. Mending a torn garment gets you about €6 off. Resoling leather shoes, up to €25. It runs through Refashion, the eco-organisation for the clothing industry, with the same no-paperwork model at certified tailors and cobblers.
Small numbers, but they're aimed at the right problem: nobody pays €20 to fix a €25 shirt seam. Cut that to €14 and the repair starts winning. Small repair shops report the scheme is bringing in customers who'd never have come otherwise.
Who Pays for All This?
Not the taxpayer, mostly. The bonus is funded by manufacturers through France's extended producer responsibility system. Companies that sell electronics and appliances in France pay into eco-organisations (Ecosystem, Ecologic, Refashion), and the 2020 anti-waste law (loi AGEC) directs part of that money into repair funds.
The same law created the French Repairability Index, the 1-to-10 score you'll see on our model pages as "France Index". Score at purchase, subsidy at repair time. It's the most complete repair policy package any country has shipped.
Does it work? 38,000 tonnes of equipment stayed out of the waste stream in 2024 because of bonus-supported repairs, by ADEME's count. The repair trades get a steady stream of customers. And the price signal reaches manufacturers too, since the companies funding the scheme have an incentive to make products cheaper to fix.
Why This Matters If You Don't Live in France
Because policy like this travels.
The EU's 2024 right-to-repair directive requires every member state to adopt at least one measure promoting repair, with a mid-2026 deadline, and France's bonus is the template most countries are looking at. Austria already runs a similar scheme that covers up to half the repair bill.
North America has nothing like it yet. What Canada and the US do have is a growing pile of right-to-repair law: parts and manuals access in Quebec, Texas, New York, California, Oregon, Colorado and Minnesota. Access first, subsidies maybe later. If a Canadian province ever pilots a repair bonus, the French playbook (fixed amounts, no forms, certified shops) is the one to copy.
Until then, if you're outside France, the maths of repair-or-replace is still on you. That's what we're here for. Our free tool weighs repair cost against replacement, device age, and how long the fix should last, no subsidy required.