What repair statistics can tell you before you replace a phone
Read repair costs, quote acceptance and repeat visits without mistaking a shop’s workload for a phone’s failure rate. Our proposed research method.
Repair statistics can help you ask better questions about a quote. They cannot, by themselves, tell you how likely every phone of that model is to fail. Before trusting a percentage, ask which devices were counted, what happened to them and which cases are missing.
Research status: this article explains how to interpret repair evidence and sets out a proposed FixIndex bulletin method. It contains no results from customer repair records and does not announce a completed study. The numerical example below is invented to explain the arithmetic.
Start with the question the number actually answers
“Most common repair” could mean the largest number of jobs in one workshop, the highest share of that workshop’s work, or the highest risk among phones in use. These are different questions. A repair log alone cannot answer the last one: it lacks the wider population, including phones that never visited the shop.
| Measure | What must be counted | What it can help explain | What it cannot establish |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typical completed repair bill | Comparable completed jobs with known totals, plus the number with missing costs | What those customers paid for the defined work | The price of your undiagnosed fault |
| Quote acceptance | Comparable written quotes with a recorded acceptance or refusal; pending decisions separately | How often that quoted work was accepted | Technical repair success or why every customer declined |
| Completion by a cutoff date | Accepted jobs from the same defined group, with open and unknown cases shown | How much accepted work had been completed by that date | A lifetime success rate |
| Recorded repeat visit | Completed jobs whose stated follow-up period has elapsed | Recorded returns for the defined issue within that period | Every later fault, including repairs elsewhere or unreported problems |
A percentage needs its denominator
Imagine 100 comparable written quotes, with 60 accepted and 40 declined. By the reporting cutoff, 54 accepted jobs are completed and six remain open. These are hypothetical counts, not FixIndex findings.
Quote acceptance is 60 ÷ 100 = 60%. Completion by that date is 54 ÷ 60 = 90% of accepted jobs. Dividing 54 by all 100 quotes gives 54%, which answers another question. None of these figures is the chance that a particular repair will work or stay fixed. The six open jobs are not automatically failures.
A responsible report would also say what “completed” means and how outcomes were checked. An invoice, a recorded post-repair check and six months of observed use are different kinds of evidence.
Compare complete costs for comparable work
An official battery-part price and a finished battery-replacement bill cover different things. A useful comparison identifies the part supplied and whether the total includes diagnosis, labour, VAT, delivery and any return-credit conditions. It separates quotes from final bills and records the relevant market and period.
Even a median—the middle value after sorting—needs context. Mixing a straightforward battery replacement with liquid-damage diagnosis and board repair produces a number that may describe none of them well. Show the number of comparable jobs and the spread of their costs, with missing figures counted explicitly.
Our repair-or-replace guide explains how to use a complete quote in a personal ownership-cost decision.
A workshop’s case mix is not the phone market
A popular model may appear frequently simply because many people own it. Older phones have had longer to accumulate wear or damage. A specialist laboratory and a walk-in workshop may receive very different problems. Some owners use a warranty route; others replace the device without asking for a quote.
For these reasons, an observed repair sample should describe its own population. It should not turn “many screen repairs recorded” into “this model has the worst screen.” Comparing providers also requires comparable work and outcomes; a different case mix is not a quality ranking.
Keep EU labels separate from workshop outcomes
The EU label guide distinguishes repairability, drop resistance and battery endurance.
For a repair decision, those fields and a workshop’s records answer different questions. We would present them alongside each other, without turning a label into a local quote or a completion rate. Neither a class nor a workshop count diagnoses your particular phone. Check the exact model and the actual fault before drawing a conclusion.
The bulletin we would find useful
A first bulletin should answer a narrow question about a broad enough group of comparable repairs. It could describe completed battery-replacement costs over a defined period, for example, without claiming to measure the reliability of every phone sold.
The following is a proposed publication protocol, not a statement that a qualifying dataset already exists.
| Before publication | What readers would receive |
|---|---|
| Define the included population and work | Provider scope, repair category, reporting period and meaningful exclusions |
| Separate stages and outcomes | Quotes, acceptances, completions, open cases and unknown outcomes with their own counts |
| Define money consistently | Quote or paid total; parts, labour, diagnosis, tax, shipping and credits explained |
| Treat repeat visits consistently | A fixed follow-up period and a clear definition of the issue counted |
| Check uncertainty and missing information | Sample size, gaps and limits; no population failure-rate claim |
| Review the proposed release for privacy | Only suitable aggregates, with rare or identifying combinations removed or combined |
Aggregated does not automatically mean anonymous
The European Commission explains that information remains personal data if someone can be identified again, including after identifiers have been replaced. A ticket code is therefore not proof of anonymity.
Our proposed method would keep customer records out of the publication. It would check combinations such as rare faults, precise dates and distinctive amounts, combine or suppress unsuitable groups, and review the intended use and release before publishing. No universal minimum count is a guarantee of anonymity. When useful detail cannot be published appropriately, the report should leave the gap visible.
Ownership, funding and your next step
Konstantinos Sevdinoglou, who represents FixIndex’s operator, also operates iRepair Rhodes and Ohmvia. Any future contribution from those businesses must be identified as such, with their populations distinguished where the work differs. It would not be an independent survey of repair providers. See our editorial standards and commercial disclosure.
For your own phone, start with a diagnosis and an itemised quote. Use the repair enquiry checklist to prepare questions, then compare the full cost with your needs, current support evidence and planned years of use. A statistic can inform that decision; it cannot make it for you.
Sources checked on 3 November 2026. This article presents definitions, reasoning and a proposed method; no repair outcomes have been measured for it.
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