Accessibility Watch › ADA Lawsuit Watch
What Does an ADA Website Lawsuit Actually Cost?
Web accessibility is a legal requirement in the United States — courts have repeatedly held that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies to business websites, not just physical storefronts. When a site isn’t accessible, the cost of that gap shows up in a predictable way. Here’s what it actually looks like.
How many ADA website lawsuits are filed?
A lot, and steadily. 3,948 US ADA website-accessibility lawsuits were filed in 2025 — and that’s just the cases that reach court. A large share of activity never appears in any docket because it’s handled through demand letters (more on those below). The filings are concentrated: a small number of plaintiff law firms file the majority of cases, often dozens at a time against unrelated businesses, using automated scanners to find targets at scale.
That last detail matters. You are not usually singled out — you’re flagged by a tool that scans thousands of sites for the same handful of common, automatically-detectable failures.
What does a lawsuit actually cost?
The settlement is only the first line item. A typical claim carries several costs at once:
- The settlement itself. Most cases settle out of court rather than going to trial, commonly for low-to-mid five figures.
- The plaintiff’s legal fees. Settlements routinely require the defendant to pay the plaintiff’s attorney fees on top of the settlement — often the larger number.
- Your own defense costs. Even a quick settlement means hiring counsel.
- Remediation. You still have to fix the site — the thing you could have done for far less before the letter arrived.
- Time and distraction. Weeks of your team’s attention pulled onto a legal problem.
What is an ADA demand letter?
Before — or instead of — filing suit, plaintiff firms frequently send a demand letter: a notice alleging your site is inaccessible and offering to settle. It’s cheaper for them than filing, and it’s designed to be cheaper for you to pay than to fight. Demand letters don’t show up in lawsuit counts, so the true volume of accessibility claims is much larger than the filing numbers suggest.
Is it cheaper to comply than to get sued?
Almost always — and it isn’t close. The barriers that draw these claims are overwhelmingly the common, automatically-detectable ones: missing image descriptions, low-contrast text, unlabeled form fields, empty links and buttons. Those are exactly the issues a free scan will find and tell you how to fix. The cost of getting compliant enough to drop off the automated-scanner radar is a fraction of a single settlement — and it’s a fixed, one-time investment instead of an open-ended legal risk.
Want to see where your own site stands? The free wcagcheckr extension finds these issues on your pages and shows you how to fix each one.
Check your site — free
Web accessibility is required under the ADA and the EU's European Accessibility Act. The free wcagcheckr extension finds the issues on your own pages and shows you exactly how to fix each one — at no cost.