A Repair Café fixes 62 percent. The other 38 percent is the point.

Repair Cafés logged 37,000 repairs in 2024 and fixed 62 percent. Why that number belongs to whoever wrote it down, and what the other 38 percent take home.

Martine Postma rented a theatre in Amsterdam-West for one afternoon. It was 18 October 2009, the Fijnhout Theater, and the idea was small enough to explain in a sentence: bring the broken thing, sit down next to someone who knows how to open it, and see.

She was a journalist, not an engineer. That turned out to matter less than she probably feared.

Seventeen years later the register kept by her foundation lists 3,818 Repair Cafés. The Netherlands and Germany had over three hundred each by 2016; today the map takes in Belgium, France, Britain, the United States, India and Japan. The format has barely changed. A hall, some tables, coffee, a few volunteers with screwdrivers and sewing machines. No charge. You are expected to stay at the table while your toaster is taken apart, and ideally to hold the torch.

What actually comes through the door

Since 2017 the foundation has been building an online tool called the RepairMonitor, where volunteers log each attempt: what the item was, how old, what was wrong, whether it worked out. The logging is voluntary, which matters in a moment. In 2024 they recorded more than 37,000 repairs. Sixty-two percent were successful.

The three most common items were vacuum cleaners, coffee makers and trousers. Not phones. Not laptops. Things that cost less than the call-out fee of a professional and so never get taken anywhere; they go in a cupboard, then in the bin. Vacuum cleaners usually arrive with a chewed cord, a dead switch or a tired motor. Two of those three are a ten-minute job for someone who has done it before.

The open repair data behind the public dashboard had grown to 305,649 logged repairs by October 2025. Anyone can look at it.

Where I would stop trusting the number

Sixty-two percent is a figure about logged repairs, not about visits. A café that never opens the RepairMonitor contributes nothing, while one with a keen secretary logs far more than its share. The foundation does not publish how many of the 3,818 cafés log at all, and it has more than once asked its own network to please enter more data. The number is real, but it belongs to the people who bothered to write it down.

The same caution applies the other way. In October 2025 the University of Auckland ran a one-afternoon café for about fifty students and staff and reported an 80 percent success rate. Fifty people, one Friday, mostly trousers, bags and small appliances. That is a nice afternoon. It is not a rate.

What the data does show, year after year, is a split. Things with no electronics in them, and textiles, get fixed most of the time. Anything with a sealed circuit board, much less often. Which is roughly what you would guess, and it is still useful to have it written down three hundred thousand times.

The 38 percent

The headline says "most things get fixed". The part it loses is the other 38 percent, and they do not leave empty-handed. The volunteer has opened the thing, named the failed part, and said one of three sentences: this part exists and costs about so much; this part does not exist any more; this was glued shut so that nobody would ever get in. All three are information the owner did not have an hour earlier. The last one is the kind that changes what you buy next time.

A survey by Repair Network Aotearoa, quoted alongside the Auckland event, asked why people come. Three answers came back: they did not know a repair service existed, they did not trust their own hands, and professional repair looked more expensive than replacement.

Why this belongs on a map of neighbours

A Repair Café is not a service. Nobody drops off a bag and collects it on Tuesday. The rule that the owner sits at the table is the whole design, and it is also the slow part: a repair that would take a technician eight minutes takes twenty-five, because the technician is explaining, and because the owner is holding the wrong end of the multimeter.

Postma started it, by her own account, to do something about waste. I doubt that is what kept it alive. I don't believe 309 cafés opened in Germany by 2016 because of landfill statistics. More likely a retired electrician in a small town had nothing to do on Saturday mornings, and a hall was free. Somebody put a notice up.

International Repair Day, invented in 2017, falls on the third Saturday of October. This year that is 17 October. If there is a café within reach of you, the thing to bring is the vacuum cleaner. If there is not one within reach, the empty spot on the map is yours: find a hall, and put a notice up.

Sources

• Repair Café International Foundation, "About Repair Café" — https://www.repaircafe.org/en/about/
• Repair Café International Foundation, "RepairMonitor factsheet provides insight into repair data for 2024", 13 May 2025 — https://www.repaircafe.org/en/repairmonitor-factsheet-provides-insight-into-repair-data-for-2024/
• RepairMonitor, open repair data dashboard and FAQ — https://www.repairmonitor.org/en/FAQ
• "Repair Café", Wikipedia, figures as of October 2025 (3,818 cafés; 305,649 logged repairs; 2016 country counts) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repair_Caf%C3%A9
• University of Auckland, "Repair cafe a 'huge hit' with 80 percent success rate", 17 October 2025 — https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/news/2025/10/17/repair-cafe-a-huge-hit-with-80-percent-success-rate.html