How Much Does Website Accessibility Cost? 2025 Pricing Guide

"How much will accessibility cost?" is usually the first question organizations ask when confronting their accessibility obligations. The answer frustratingly depends on many variables: your current website condition, how many pages you have, what technologies you use, and what level of compliance you're targeting.

But vague answers don't help with budgeting. This guide provides real pricing ranges for different accessibility investments in 2025, helping you understand what to expect and plan accordingly.

The Short Answer

For a typical business website with 50-100 pages that has never been addressed for accessibility, expect to spend roughly:

• Initial audit: $5,000-$15,000 for comprehensive expert evaluation
• Remediation: $15,000-$50,000 for one-time fixes
• Ongoing monitoring: $200-$1,000/month
• Annual maintenance: $5,000-$15,000/year

Total first-year investment: approximately $25,000-$80,000, with ongoing annual costs of $7,000-$25,000.

Enterprise applications, e-commerce platforms, and complex web applications will see costs multiply significantly—sometimes to $200,000 or more for initial remediation alone.

These numbers might seem high, but they're substantially less than the cost of accessibility lawsuits ($50,000+ in legal fees alone) or the lost revenue from inaccessible experiences (potentially millions for large e-commerce operations).

Audit Costs

Automated Scanning Only

Automated tools provide the most affordable entry point for understanding your accessibility status, though they only catch 30-40% of issues.

Free tools: Browser extensions like axe DevTools and WAVE provide free scanning for individual pages.

Subscription services: $100-$500/month for scanning multiple pages with ongoing monitoring and reporting dashboards.

Enterprise scanning platforms: $1,000-$3,000/month for large-scale scanning with advanced features, API access, and integrations.

Automated scanning is valuable for ongoing monitoring but insufficient as a complete accessibility assessment.

Manual Expert Audits

Human evaluation catches what tools miss and provides actionable remediation guidance.

Basic manual audit (5-10 pages): $2,000-$5,000 Covers homepage, key landing pages, and primary user flows. Identifies critical issues but may miss problems in untested areas.

Comprehensive manual audit (20-50 pages): $8,000-$20,000 Thorough evaluation covering representative samples of all page types, forms, dynamic content, and major user journeys. Tests with multiple assistive technologies.

Enterprise-scale audit (100+ pages/complex applications): $25,000-$75,000+ Large organizations with multiple sites, applications, or complex functionality require extensive evaluation. May involve multiple auditors and extended timelines.

Audits with User Testing

Adding testing with people who have disabilities significantly improves audit quality.

Basic user testing (3-5 participants): Add $5,000-$10,000 Includes recruitment, facilitation, and analysis of testing sessions.

Comprehensive user testing (8-12 participants across disability types): Add $15,000-$30,000 Tests with users representing various disabilities (blind, low vision, motor, cognitive, deaf/hard of hearing) across multiple tasks.

Remediation Costs

Fixing accessibility issues typically costs more than identifying them. Remediation complexity varies enormously based on what's wrong and how your site is built.

Content and Markup Fixes

Some fixes are straightforward content updates requiring minimal technical expertise.

Alt text remediation: $1-$5 per image Writing quality alt text requires understanding image purpose and context. At scale, 500 images × $3 = $1,500.

Color contrast fixes: $500-$2,000 Identifying accessible color alternatives that maintain brand identity, updating CSS throughout the site.

Heading structure corrections: $500-$3,000 Reorganizing heading hierarchy across templates and content pages.

Form label fixes: $50-$200 per form Adding proper labels, instructions, and error handling to forms.

Code-Level Remediation

Technical fixes requiring developer involvement cost more.

Keyboard navigation fixes: $2,000-$10,000 Adding keyboard support to custom components, ensuring focus management, implementing skip links.

ARIA implementation: $3,000-$15,000 Properly implementing ARIA roles, states, and properties for dynamic content and complex widgets.

Focus management improvements: $1,000-$5,000 Ensuring focus moves appropriately during dynamic content updates, modal interactions, and single-page application navigation.

Component and Template Remediation

Many sites share templates and components—fixing these once propagates fixes across the site.

Template fixes: $1,000-$5,000 per template Navigation headers, footers, sidebars, and other repeated elements that need accessibility updates.

Component library updates: $5,000-$30,000 Updating or replacing UI component libraries (date pickers, tabs, accordions, modals) with accessible versions.

Third-Party Content

Third-party integrations often create accessibility barriers you can't directly fix.

Third-party widget replacement: $2,000-$10,000 Replacing inaccessible embedded content (maps, chat widgets, forms) with accessible alternatives.

Video remediation: $3-$10 per video minute for captioning; $15-$30 per minute for audio description

Total Remediation Estimates

Simple marketing website (20-50 pages): $5,000-$20,000 Mainly content fixes, some template updates, limited custom component work.

Medium business website (50-200 pages): $15,000-$50,000 Significant content remediation, template fixes, some component work, form updates.

E-commerce site: $30,000-$100,000 Product pages, checkout flows, account management, search and filtering—all need attention.

Complex web application: $50,000-$250,000+ Custom components, dense functionality, and numerous user flows create extensive remediation scope.

Ongoing Monitoring Costs

Accessibility isn't a one-time fix. Websites change constantly—new content, feature updates, design refreshes—and each change can introduce accessibility issues.

Automated monitoring platforms: $200-$1,000/month Continuous scanning catches new issues as they appear. More comprehensive platforms cost more.

Periodic manual audits: $3,000-$10,000/quarter or annually Regular expert review to catch issues automated tools miss.

Combination approach: $500-$2,000/month Automated monitoring supplemented with periodic manual review provides comprehensive coverage.

Building Accessibility Into Development

Organizations that integrate accessibility into their development process spend less on remediation over time.

Developer training: $500-$2,000 per developer One-time investment in helping developers build accessibly from the start.

Design system updates: $10,000-$50,000 Creating or updating component libraries with accessibility built in.

CI/CD pipeline integration: $5,000-$15,000 Automated accessibility testing in development workflows catches issues before deployment.

Ongoing developer time: 10-20% additional development effort Building accessibly takes slightly longer than ignoring accessibility, but far less time than remediation.

Cost Factors

Several variables significantly affect accessibility investment requirements:

Current state: Sites that have never addressed accessibility cost more to remediate than those with some existing attention to accessibility.

Technology stack: Custom JavaScript frameworks often cost more to remediate than sites using standard HTML. Legacy systems with limited update capability may require rebuilds.

Content volume: More pages mean more content to review and potentially fix. Video-heavy sites face significant captioning costs.

Complexity: Simple informational sites cost less than e-commerce platforms, which cost less than complex web applications.

Timeline: Rush jobs cost more. Spreading remediation over months or years reduces annual spending but extends risk exposure.

Comparing to Costs of Non-Compliance

Accessibility investment should be weighed against the costs of remaining inaccessible:

Lawsuit defense: $50,000-$150,000+ in legal fees, even without settlement Settlement costs: $15,000-$100,000+ for typical single-plaintiff settlements Class action exposure: Millions for large companies with systematic accessibility failures Lost revenue: 15-25% of population has disabilities; inaccessibility loses their business Remediation under legal pressure: 2-3x normal costs when working under court deadlines

A $50,000 proactive accessibility investment looks reasonable compared to a $100,000 lawsuit settlement plus $75,000 in emergency remediation under legal deadlines.

Optimizing Your Investment

Several strategies help organizations get the most accessibility value for their budget:

Prioritize by user impact: Fix barriers that completely block access before addressing minor issues.

Fix templates and components: Remediation that affects many pages provides better ROI than page-by-page fixes.

Integrate early: Building accessibility into new features costs far less than retroactive remediation.

Monitor continuously: Catching issues when introduced prevents accumulated accessibility debt.

Train your team: People who understand accessibility create fewer issues requiring future fixes.

Taking Action

Accessibility costs money—there's no getting around it. But the investment pays returns through legal protection, expanded market reach, improved usability for all users, and alignment with ethical business practices.

Start with an audit to understand your current state, prioritize remediation by impact, and implement monitoring to prevent backsliding. The sooner you begin, the less you'll ultimately spend.

TestParty provides affordable continuous accessibility monitoring starting at a fraction of traditional audit costs.

Schedule a TestParty demo and get a 14-day compliance implementation plan.

Related Resources

• Accessibility Compliance Cost Calculator
• Accessibility ROI Calculator
• Remediation Cost Analysis
• Automated vs One-Time Audits