ADA Compliance Audit Cost: 10 ADA Compliance Auditors and Website Audit Providers Priced

This is the most useful thing on the page, so it goes first.

Read the three published models side by side and they look like variations on one theme. They are not. Each one counts a different thing.

Accessible.org counts pages or screens, then applies that rate to a representative sample of unique templates and key flows. Web Audit Solutions counts page types and bills a flat fee for the band you fall into: up to 10 types, up to 20 types, more than 20. The AudioEye guide counts raw pages, which is why its ladder tops out at "100+ pages, $25,000+".

Now put a real site through all three. A university department site with 5,000 published URLs is typically built from about a dozen templates: a landing page, a news index, a news article, a staff directory, a staff profile, a course listing, a course detail, a form, a search result, an error page, and a couple of one-off pages. Sampled by template, that is roughly a 12 to 20 screen job. Under Accessible.org rates at the medium tier it prices near $2,100 to $3,500. Under Web Audit Solutions it is a "more than 20 page types" job only if you count generously, and otherwise the $3,000 Full audit band. Under the raw page count model in the AudioEye guide, 5,000 URLs is the $25,000+ row.

If you think that spread is an artifact of comparing three different companies, look at what happens inside one of them. Accessible.org publishes "Most accessibility audits cost between $1,250 and $2,750" on its pricing page. On its own application audit page the same company writes that "A focused evaluation of a single-role SaaS product with 15 to 20 screens can start around $4,000" and runs to "$12,000 or more" for multiple roles and dozens of unique screens. Both statements are current, both are from the vendor, and the low end of one is roughly a third of the low end of the other. Nothing is wrong: a brochure site of 15 screens and a multi-role SaaS product of 15 screens are not the same job, because a screen with four permission states and a live data grid is four screens and a test harness. That is the whole argument in one vendor, on two of their own pages. The screen count does not price the audit. What is inside the screen prices the audit. A bidder who quotes from your URL count alone has not looked at your product yet.

Nothing dishonest is happening in any of those numbers. They answer different questions. But a procurement officer collecting three quotes will see $3,000, $3,000 and $25,000 and conclude that two vendors are cutting corners, when what actually differs is the sampling method. Before you compare a single price, make every bidder state the unit and the sample. Ask for the count of unique templates and flows they intend to test, in writing, as part of the quote. Two quotes that name the same 18 screens are comparable. Two quotes that name a dollar figure are not.

The corollary is worth stating too, because it cuts the other way. Template sampling is the correct method for a database driven site, and it is what the WCAG-EM evaluation methodology describes. It is the wrong method for a site where thousands of pages were hand built over fifteen years by different people, which is the normal condition in higher education and local government. There, the templates do not constrain the markup, and a sample of twelve tells you very little about page nine hundred. If that is your site, a low quote based on templates is not a bargain. It is a smaller job than the one you have.

For a small to mid-size site audited by template sample, budget $1,250 to $3,500. That is the band the two providers who publish full rate cards both land in, from opposite directions: Accessible.org states most quotes fall between $1,250 and $2,750, and Web Audit Solutions prices a Full WCAG 2.2 AA audit at $1,500 for a small site and $3,000 for a medium one.

Above that, the published evidence thins out fast. Web Audit Solutions puts a large site with extensive interactivity at $7,000. The AudioEye guide, which prints market ranges rather than its own prices, puts mid-size engagements at $5,000 to $20,000 and enterprise at $20,000 to $50,000 or more. Those upper figures are consistent with what enterprise audits are quoted at, but no vendor we checked publishes them as their own rate, so treat them as a planning range and nothing firmer.

Three things reliably push a quote up. Interactivity is the biggest: a checkout, a booking flow, a data table with sorting and filtering, or an interactive map each cost several times what a content page costs, because each has to be driven by keyboard and by screen reader in more than one browser. Native mobile apps are priced separately and higher. And re-testing after you fix things is sometimes included and sometimes not: Web Audit Solutions includes follow-up re-testing in the Full audit and not in Express, which is a real part of the price difference and easy to miss.

Ask for WCAG 2.2 Level AA unless a specific contract names 2.1. WCAG 2.2 is the current W3C recommendation, it adds nine success criteria over 2.1, and it is a superset for practical purposes, so a 2.2 audit also tells you where you stand against 2.1. Buying a 2.1 audit today means paying again later for the same screens.

Here is where the two published rate cards behave completely differently, and it is the second thing on this page that no comparison article states. Accessible.org charges a flat premium: in its own words, "WCAG 2.2 AA quotes are 10% more vs. 2.1 AA". It publishes a worked example, a desktop-only VPAT audit quoted at $1,150 for 2.1 AA and $1,265 for 2.2 AA, a $115 difference. Web Audit Solutions does not sell a cheap 2.2 audit at all. WCAG 2.1 AA is the standard on its $500 Express product; WCAG 2.2 AA appears only on the Full audit, which starts at $1,500. So the same request, "we want 2.2 rather than 2.1", costs you 10% at one provider and a minimum of three times as much at the other.

That is not a trick. The Express product is a narrower deliverable, described as a basic evaluation of significant violations affecting blind and low vision users, and it would not carry a 2.2 conformance claim credibly. But it means the version question and the depth question are welded together in one vendor catalog and separable in another, so you cannot hold the standard constant across bids without asking.

One more version note for public sector buyers. The DOJ Title II rule sets WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard, not 2.2. If your obligation is Title II, a 2.1 AA audit is the letter of the requirement. Most agencies still buy 2.2 because the extra criteria are inexpensive to test at the same time and the next rulemaking will not go backwards.

Every price in the table above buys a review of web pages. Not one of them covers the documents your site links to, and on a government, university or healthcare site those documents are usually the larger half of the problem.

The gap is easy to miss because it is invisible in the deliverable. An auditor tests your templates, finds contrast and label defects, writes a report, and the report is complete and correct for what was scoped. Meanwhile the site links out to several hundred PDFs, and under both Section 508 and the DOJ Title II rule those PDFs are conventional electronic documents in scope in their own right. Nothing in the web audit looked at them.

Where document work is priced at all, it is priced per document page and separately, and the rate is worth reading carefully because the one vendor that publishes it publishes two different numbers. Accessible.org states "PDFs start at $4.00/page" on its pricing page, while its PDF remediation service page prices simple remediation at $7.50 to $9.50 per page, advanced work needing OCR, forms or detailed alt text at $9.50 to $11.50, and complex documents at $11.50 and up, noting that 90% of its page based quotes land in those bands. Word and PowerPoint files are $7.00 per page. The $4.00 figure is a floor for the simplest possible file, not a planning rate.

Run the realistic band against a modest backlog and the arithmetic gets uncomfortable fast. 300 documents averaging 8 pages is 2,400 pages. At the $7.50 simple rate that is $18,000, and at the $9.50 top of the simple band it is $22,800, against a web audit quote of maybe $3,000. The document bill is six to eight times the audit and it appears in no line of the audit proposal.

Two things reduce it, and both are worth doing before you sign anything. The first is the preexisting documents exception in the Title II rule, which we cover in detail on our PDF remediation for universities page. The second is the one that stops the bill recurring: on most public sector sites the majority of PDFs are generated, out of a CMS, a reporting tool or a forms system, and every one of them will carry the same defects as the last. Remediating those one at a time is paying repeatedly for a single upstream bug. Fixing the template and turning tagging on at render time removes the defect from every future document, which is what our accessible PDF generation comparison is about. Audit the web pages, price the historical backlog honestly, and fix the generator so the backlog stops growing.

Four steps, in this order. They take an afternoon and they are the difference between three bids you can evaluate and three numbers you cannot.

1. Build the screen list yourself. Do not ask vendors to scope it, because each will scope it in the unit that suits their model. Walk the site and write down every unique template and every multi-step flow: log in, search, apply, pay, book, contact. Twelve to twenty five items is normal. Include the error and empty states, which are where keyboard traps and unannounced errors live and which almost nobody lists.

2. Fix the standard in writing. Name the version and level: WCAG 2.2 Level AA, or WCAG 2.1 Level AA if a contract requires it. Say whether mobile web, native apps and PDFs are in or out. Being explicit that documents are out of scope is fine; leaving it unsaid is how a $3,000 audit turns into an $18,000 surprise.

3. Ask what happens after the report. Is re-testing included once fixes are made, and for how long? Is developer support available while fixing, and at what rate? Accessible.org publishes $195 an hour with a two hour minimum for validation and consultation, which is a useful benchmark for judging an unpublished one. Will they produce a VPAT or ACR from the audit, and at what price? The published ladder there runs $350 for the WCAG edition, $550 for Section 508, $650 for EN 301 549 and $950 for the international edition.

4. Run an automated scan first, and do not skip this. A free scan across your template list finds the systematic machine detectable defects in an hour. Fixing those before the audit means you are paying expert hours for the judgment failures automation cannot see, which is the only thing a manual audit is uniquely good at. Our comparison of 508 compliance testing software covers which scanners publish a price and which do not.

Six of the ten providers we checked publish nothing, and it is worth saying plainly that this is not evidence of bad faith. An accessibility audit is expert labor, and the labor is genuinely variable in a way a software subscription is not. Two sites with the same page count can differ fourfold in effort depending on how much of the interface is custom JavaScript, how many states each component has, and whether anyone has ever tested it with a screen reader before. A firm that publishes a flat number either overcharges the simple site or loses money on the complex one.

The consequence for you is procedural rather than moral. When six of ten bidders will only quote after a call, the comparison you run is on scope documents, not on rate cards, which is exactly why step 1 above matters. Bring your own screen list and every one of those calls becomes short and specific.

The two firms that do publish are useful beyond their own quotes, for the same reason a published rate card is useful in any opaque category. They give you an anchor. If an unpublished quote comes back at four times the published per screen rate for a comparable scope, that is a question worth asking, and you now have a number to ask it with.