On September 1, 2026, a new Texas repair law took effect. If your company manufactures anything with a chip in it, or sells equipment it had built to its own specification, the law creates obligations you did not have on August 31. If your company repairs equipment somebody else made, it creates leverage you did not have either.
House Bill 2963 passed the 89th Legislature and added a new chapter to the Texas Business and Commerce Code governing the diagnosis, maintenance, and repair of digital electronic equipment. It is short, it is narrower than the coverage suggests, and it lands squarely on a category of North Texas business that rarely thinks of itself as regulated: the mid sized manufacturer in Richardson or Plano that builds a connected product and keeps repair inside its own dealer network.
Here is what the statute actually says, who it reaches, and what a Collin County business owner should do about it this quarter.
What the law requires
The core obligation sits in Section 121.051. For digital electronic equipment sold or used in Texas, the original equipment manufacturer must, not later than one year after the date of the first sale of that equipment, make available on fair and reasonable terms to any independent repair provider or to an owner the documentation, replacement parts, and tools, or their equivalents, required for diagnosis, maintenance, or repair.
Read that sentence twice, because four separate things in it matter.
First, the trigger is the first sale in Texas, not the manufacturing date and not the date the product line launched nationally. Second, the deadline is one year from that sale, so a product that went on sale in Texas last month gives you until roughly this time next year. Third, the obligation runs to two different groups: independent repair shops and ordinary owners. A business that bought your equipment can ask for the same materials a repair shop can. Fourth, the statute lets you satisfy the obligation indirectly. You can provide these materials yourself, or through an authorized repair provider, or through a third party provider. You are not required to build a parts counter.
What counts as digital electronic equipment
The definition is deliberately broad. Digital electronic equipment means any product that depends, wholly or partly, on digital electronics embedded in or attached to the product to function.
That is not a technology sector definition. It is a definition that captures a commercial ice machine with a control board, a fleet telematics unit, a point of sale terminal, a piece of shop equipment with a programmable controller, and a great deal of light industrial product that nobody would describe as consumer electronics. If the thing stops working when the board fails, it is probably digital electronic equipment.
The definition of original equipment manufacturer is similarly practical. It means a person that, in the normal course of business, is engaged in the business of selling, leasing, or otherwise supplying new digital electronic equipment manufactured by or on behalf of the person. The phrase “on behalf of” is the one to notice. If you design a product, contract the build overseas, and sell it under your own name, you are the manufacturer for purposes of this chapter. The contract manufacturer is not standing between you and the statute.
The exclusion list is long, and it may save you
Before you build a compliance program, read Section 121.002(b). The chapter does not apply to a substantial list of categories, including critical infrastructure information technology equipment, motor vehicle manufacturers complying with industry agreements, powersports vehicles and outboard motors, medical devices and equipment used in medical settings, farm equipment manufacturers operating under industry agreements, aerospace and airplane and train equipment, heavy equipment, commercial and industrial electrical equipment, home appliances with embedded digital components, safety communications equipment, fire alarm and life safety systems, and video game consoles.
There is also an exclusion for manufacturers that provide replacement parts at no charge at the customer’s discretion.
Several of these carve outs are wide enough to matter in North Texas. Commercial and industrial electrical equipment, heavy equipment, and medical devices between them cover a meaningful share of the region’s manufacturing base. Some of the exclusions, though, are conditional rather than absolute. The motor vehicle and farm equipment carve outs depend on compliance with existing industry memoranda of understanding, which means a manufacturer relying on them needs to confirm it is actually a participant rather than assuming the category alone is enough. That is a document review, not a judgment call, and it is worth doing before somebody else does it for you.
What you are not required to hand over
Section 121.052 is the provision that makes this workable for manufacturers with real intellectual property to protect. You do not have to provide materials that you do not already provide to your own authorized repair providers. You do not have to provide anything that is no longer available. You do not have to divulge a trade secret beyond what is necessary for diagnosis, maintenance, or repair. You do not have to provide documentation or tools whose function is to disable or override a security lock or an anti theft measure. You do not have to supply source code, and you do not have to supply parts or tools that would enable device cloning in violation of federal law.
The trade secret limitation is the one that will get litigated first, because it is drafted as a proportionality test rather than a blanket exemption. The question is not whether a service manual contains proprietary information. It is whether disclosure goes beyond what repair actually requires. A manufacturer that wants the benefit of that limitation should be able to explain, in writing and in advance, which specific materials it withholds and why the withheld content is not necessary to diagnose or fix the product. That memo is cheap to write now and expensive to reconstruct later.
Section 121.053 provides a further off ramp. Rather than supplying the materials, a manufacturer may reimburse the purchase price the buyer paid for the equipment, or provide an equivalent or better readily available replacement at a price equal to or less than the total cost. For a low value product line, that may be the more sensible answer than standing up a documentation program.
The liability shield nobody is talking about
Most of the commentary on this statute has focused on what manufacturers must give up. Section 121.054 runs the other direction and is, for many companies, the most valuable provision in the chapter.
Under that section, a manufacturer or authorized repair provider is not liable for any damage or injury that occurs as a result of repair, diagnosis, maintenance, or modification performed by an independent repair provider or an owner. The shield extends to indirect, incidental, special, and consequential damages, and to loss of data, privacy, or profits. The section also protects a manufacturer for acts reasonably necessary to protect user privacy, security, or digital safety, and for data breaches connected to an independent repair.
In other words, the Legislature paired the disclosure obligation with a statutory answer to the objection manufacturers raised loudest, which was that opening up repair would import somebody else’s mistakes onto their balance sheet. Whether that shield holds up against every theory a plaintiff might plead is a question courts have not answered yet, and a Texas business should not treat it as a substitute for its own warranty language and product documentation. But it is a real defense written into the statute, and it should be cited in your terms.
How this gets enforced
The enforcement structure is unusually forgiving, and understanding it should lower the temperature for most business owners.
Section 121.101 gives the Texas Attorney General exclusive authority to enforce the chapter. Before bringing an action, the Attorney General must provide written notice at least 30 days in advance identifying the specific violations. An action is barred entirely if the recipient cures the violation within that 30 day window and provides a written statement of intent to cure.
If a violation is not cured, Section 121.102 makes it a deceptive trade practice actionable under Subchapter E of Chapter 17, the Deceptive Trade Practices Act. Section 121.103 lets the Attorney General seek an injunction and recover reasonable attorney’s fees and expenses.
And Section 121.104 says plainly that the chapter may not be construed to create, provide a basis for, or be subject to a private right of action. No competitor is going to sue you under this statute. No repair shop is going to sue you under this statute. The only enforcement path runs through Austin, and it begins with a letter and a month to fix the problem.
That last point is worth sitting with. The realistic exposure here is not a surprise lawsuit. It is a notice letter that arrives while nobody at the company knows whether the chapter applies, followed by 30 days of scrambling. A company that has already answered the applicability question in writing can respond to that letter in a week.
What to do in the next 90 days
Four steps, in order.
Start with applicability. For each product line you sell in Texas, write down whether it depends on embedded digital electronics to function, whether it fits one of the Section 121.002(b) exclusions, and the date of its first Texas sale. That last date sets your one year clock. Products first sold in Texas before September 1, 2026 are outside the chapter entirely, because it applies only to equipment originally made available for sale in this state on or after the effective date. For many manufacturers, that single fact resolves most of the catalog.
Second, inventory what you already give your authorized network. The statute measures your obligation against your own existing practice. If your dealers get a service manual, a diagnostic tool, and a parts price list, those are the baseline. If they get nothing, your obligation is correspondingly narrow.
Third, review your existing dealer and authorized service agreements. The chapter provides that contracts between authorized repair providers and manufacturers entered into before the effective date supersede the chapter’s provisions where they conflict. Agreements signed after September 1, 2026 do not get that treatment, so the renewal calendar matters.
Fourth, decide your pricing and access mechanism before somebody asks. Fair and reasonable terms, as the statute defines it for tools, means making the tool available without conditioning it on the recipient being an authorized repair provider, and at no cost or at a cost equivalent to the lowest actual cost you offer to an authorized provider. A pricing page you set deliberately is a much better record than a number you improvise in response to a request.
The bigger point
Texas now has an electronics repair statute on the books, and the practical effect for most North Texas companies will be modest. The exclusions are broad, the enforcement is exclusive to the Attorney General, the cure period is generous, and there is no private right of action.
What the law does change is the assumption that repair access is purely a commercial decision. For covered equipment, it is now partly a statutory one, and the answer needs to be documented rather than assumed. Companies that treat this as a two page memo written this fall will never think about it again. Companies that wait for a letter will spend considerably more.
If you want help determining whether this chapter reaches your product line, or reviewing your dealer agreements before they renew, the business attorneys at Hanshaw Kennedy Hafen work with companies across Frisco, Plano, McKinney, and the surrounding North Texas communities. Visit our Business Law page to learn more.