§1.2.1.2 Contracts concluded between a seller or supplier and a consumer

As soon as there is a seller or supplier on one side and a consumer on the other side, the contract is deemed to be covered by the UCTD as expressed by the second whereas-clause of Recital 10. Recital 10 clarifies that the UCTD applies to all contracts concluded between sellers or suppliers and consumers. This implies that the UCTD applies to all contracts concerning the purchase of goods and the supply of services and the Court has clarified that the UCTD is indeed intended to apply ‘in all sectors of economic activity (48).’ Recital 10 further explains that inter alia contracts relating to employment, contracts relating to succession rights, contracts relating to rights under family law and contracts relating to the incorporation and organization of companies or partnership agreements (49)‘must be excluded’ from its scope. As limitations of the scope of the Directive, those examples (50) will have to be interpreted narrowly (51). The UCTD does not require that the consumer has to provide monetary consideration for a good or service. The Court has not considered monetary consideration to be necessary. It (52) has, for instance, held that private persons who provide a guarantee for a loan taken out by another party may be protected under the UCTD even though the guarantee contract does not stipulate any monetary consideration for a specific service. Therefore, also contracts between consumers and providers of social media services must be considered to be covered by the UCTD regardless of whether consumers have to pay certain amounts of money or whether the consideration for the services consists in consumer generated content and profiling (53). Where an ancillary contract, for instance a guarantee contract, is concluded between a seller or supplier and a consumer, that contract is covered by the UCTD, even if the main contract, for instance a loan, is concluded between two commercial companies and is therefore outside its scope (54). The Court has ruled on a limited number of specific cases where national courts had doubts about the classification of a given contract and has clarified that the following types of contracts are covered by the UCTD: — residential tenancy agreements concluded between, on the one hand, an individual acting on a non-commercial basis and, on the other hand, a real estate professional (55), — contracts on the supply of legal services (56), — a mortgage credit contract concluded by a lawyer for private purposes (57), — a contract concluded by a free educational establishment by which it grants one of its students repayment facilities for sums which the students owe in respect of registration fees and costs connected with a study trip (58), — a contract of guarantee or a contract providing security concluded between a natural person and a credit institution in order to secure contractual obligations owed by a commercial company to the credit institution under a credit agreement, where the guarantor acted for purposes outside his trade, business or profession and has no link of a functional nature with that company (59), — a mortgage loan which an employer granted to an employee and his spouse for private purposes (60).

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Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-09-07