October 28, 2026

Fixing brought us together on Repair Day 2026

On the 17th October (and a couple of weeks either side!), organisers in 53 countries held 3,497 events, truly embodying this year’s theme of ‘repair brings us together’.

At a time when communities are so divided, when tensions are being stoked around the world, to see thousands of events where people shared skills, knowledge, time, and care with each other is truly heartening. It speaks to the passion and power that our global repair community has at its core.

Part of our goal for International Repair Day is to reach repair communities who are not yet included in our network, to bring them into the fold and connect them with their peers and supportive networks. So we were thrilled to see that Repair Day continued to expand to new countries and territories this year including, Costa Rica, Egypt, Greenland, Indonesia, Lithuania and South Sudan — all places where we haven’t seen events held before!

Repair records hit half a million milestone

As is now a Repair Day tradition, The Open Repair Alliance released their new dataset which hit a new milestone of over half a million records of repair attempts by the community repair movement. For the first time the dataset includes both EEE and non-EEE repair attempts, substantially increasing the number of records for people to explore and analyse. This release shows us that on average, over 400 repair attempts are happening each day around the world — an average we’re sure was beaten on Repair Day though!

How you celebrated around the world

This year, in the spirit of celebration and with a bit of trepidation, we encouraged groups to hold ‘repair festivals’ to mark the occasion and our fixing family delivered!

In London, The Restart Project, held a ‘Festival of Fixing’ at the iconic Barbican Centre. The space was abuzz with energy and inspiration as people young and old gathered to learn how to repair and get creative through activities including crafty workshops and a repair cafe.

Elsewhere in the UK there were almost 350 events, an increase of over 100 from last year’s edition. Activity ranged from full-on festivals to local groups celebrating with their close knit communities: Share Portsmouth held their first edition of ‘Circle Fest’; Bristol organisations came together to hold a city-wide, two-week programme called ‘Celebrating Repair Cultures’; Repair Cafe Northern Ireland truly embraced this year’s theme by running a special repair event with immigrant and refugee communities in Belfast; Arran Repair Cafe and other sustainability organisations on the Isle of Arran teamed up to supercharge their impact; and eight councils across London came together for a Fix-a-thon!

Over in France, HOP tells us that the fourth edition of Les Journées Nationales de la Réparation was a great success with over 1300 events happening around the country. The repair community joined forces across all of France, rural and urban, to celebrate and make visible the world of repair.

Our aim is simple: make repair a habit that is both instinctive and accessible to all. We are one step closer!

– Molly Davison, HOP – Halte à l'Obsolescence Programmée

Celebrations continued to grow in India with 12 events held to mark the occasion. Purna Sarkar shares that: Repair Café Collective India organised five events in collaboration with Repair Café Chennai Initiative and Kreu Makerspace, Bengaluru; kick-started new community Repair events in Ahmedabad and Pune; and hosted an online repair event with Global Shapers, Gurgaon. These event formats included a whole range of activities like DIY troubleshooting, service camps, repair training and repair walks.

Reporting from Aotearoa New Zealand, Brigitte Sistig tells us that Aotearoa New Zealand’s Repair Movement celebrated two major milestones on Repair Day (which was also their national organisation’s 5th birthday): the official launch of the permanent repair co-lab in Kingsland, Auckland and the release of their Repair Manifesto.

The manifesto sets out our vision for a future where repair is made the easy choice: products engineered for durability and ease of repair, thriving local repair ecosystems, and the legislative frameworks required to enable them.

– Brigitte Sistig, Repair Network Aotearoa

In Italy, Repair Cafe Pavia and the University of Pavia Office of Sustainable Actions collaborated to hold their first Repair Day Festival. The celebration coincided with Repair Cafe Pavia’s 10th birthday and Repair Cafe Borgarello’s 2nd birthday and included talks on a range of topics, a repair cafe, and a series of workshops. They successfully repaired 76% of the items brought in for repair, saving 793 kg of CO2e, an impact equivalent to growing approximately 13 young trees for 10 years. They’re hoping for the festival to become an annual event! Nearby(ish) in Turin, Repair Day was marked by the opening of POST, described as “a new workshop for the third millennium” by co-founder Ugo Vallauri. The launch event featured a Restart Party, the opening of the library of things as part of the Leila network, and a DJ set to celebrate. They hope to regularly bring these elements together to inspire a circular revolution.

Over in Belgium, there was a flurry of activity including in Brussels where Manneken Pis was once again dressed up in his handsome repairman’s outfit, he even got to wear his wedding veil for a speech addressed to the newlyweds. In Wallonia , the Mobile Repair Café was at the SPARKOH! museum for an open-air repair session. Many Repair Cafés were in operation all weekend in all four corners of Wallonia, and Repair Together organised a textile training course in Stoumont, in collaboration with Idélux , in order to give a second life to worn clothes, to fight against fast fashion.

Across the pond in the USA, US PIRG shared their experience of the day with the team attending a variety of events across the country: at Artisans Asylum in Brighton, Massachusetts, a stuck “S” key was replaced; at Ripe for Repair in Portland, Maine there was a repair meet up; and at the Anchorage Museum in Alaska, they hosted a Fix-It Clinic looking at electronics, textiles and machinery! Washington takes the prize for the most events in one US state with 34 celebrations — a big thank you to Repair Reuse Washington for mobilising this network.

In Argentina, Club de Reparadores got together to repair and beautify objects at their headquarters in Buenos Aires, it was a special edition focused on repairing handles of all kinds for kitchenware and tableware. They joined forces with the art collective Reparar y Embellecer, along with volunteer restorers and repairers and shared the afternoon by fighting obsolescence.

The piano was playing and objects were retuning to life. Mission accomplished.

– Meli Scioli, Club de Reparadores

Make-a-thek Cape Town held their first ‘RE:MAKE Festival’, a week of events culminated on Repair Day itself. Sights and sounds from the day included “children rapping in the library, sewing machines humming, people making music from discarded objects and a group of enthusiastic volunteers tackling a blocked drain.”

Repair is hardly a new concept. It’s part of everyday life in so many communities — making do, adapting, finding new uses for things and sharing knowledge…We discovered that what people took away wasn’t always something they’d made or fixed.

– Kirstin Wiedow, Global Innovation Gathering

What a day! We know that this is only a small snapshot of the activity that happened on the day, so let us know how you celebrated Repair Day in the comments.

What’s next?

Repair Day 2027 will fall on October 16th and it’s never too early to get involved. So save the date and join our mailing list for updates on what’s to come.

Learn more about what went on: