VPAT services: what a VPAT audit costs, and how to get a VPAT without overpaying

A VPAT service costs $350 to $950 for the report itself, depending on which edition you need, and that fee almost never includes the accessibility audit the report has to be based on. The audit is the real line item, published at $100 to $250 per page or screen and typically totalling $1,250 to $2,750 for a small product. Budget for two purchases, not one.

Those figures come from the two vendors we could find who publish a rate card at all. We read four VPAT providers' pricing pages on 21 August 2026. Two publish complete prices, one publishes none and asks you to scope the job through a form, and one blocked our request entirely. That ratio is the single most useful thing to know before you start collecting quotes, because it means most of the market will not tell you a number until you have described your product to a salesperson.

What VPAT services actually publish

Every figure below was read off the vendor's own pricing page on 21 August 2026. Where a vendor does not publish a number, this table says so rather than guessing.

Notice what the two published rate cards agree on. Both quote exactly $350, $550, $650 and $950 for the WCAG, 508, EU and INT editions. When two independent vendors land on the same four numbers, you are looking at something close to a market rate for the paperwork, which means the VPAT fee is not where your quotes will differ. The audit is.

How much does a VPAT cost in total?

For a small SaaS product with a handful of unique screens, the realistic all in figure from a published rate card is roughly $1,600 to $3,700: an audit at $1,250 to $2,750 plus a report at $350 to $950. Bigger products scale on screen count, not on report count. A product with forty distinct templates and several complex user flows can pass $10,000 for the audit alone, and no published rate card will cover you at that size.

Two things reliably push the number up. The first is asking for the INT edition when you only sell to US buyers, which adds $600 over the WCAG edition for standards you will never be asked about. The second is discovering mid audit that your product generates documents nobody has ever tested, which is the subject of the next section and by some distance the most expensive surprise in this process.

Why is the audit sold separately from the VPAT?

Because they are genuinely different work, and the separation is honest rather than a billing trick.

The audit is the testing: someone works through your product against each Level A and Level AA success criterion, manually, with assistive technology, and records what happens. The VPAT service is the translation of those findings into the ITI template, with each row rated Supports, Partially Supports, Does Not Support or Not Applicable and each shortfall explained in the remarks column. The second job takes hours. The first takes days.

This is also why a vendor offering a cheap VPAT with no audit attached should worry you. A report written from a questionnaire rather than from testing is a document full of confident claims nobody verified, and it is your name on it, not the consultant's. Our page on the VPAT and Accessibility Conformance Report covers what each conformance rating means and what belongs in the remarks column, which is worth reading before you approve a draft somebody else wrote about your product.

The line item that catches software vendors: your generated documents

Here is where the arithmetic turns unpleasant, and where most VPAT budgets are set wrongly.

Both published rate cards charge for PDF remediation per page. Accessibility Consulting is consistent about it, at "Starting at $8 per page". Accessible.org is not: re-read on 9 September 2026, its pricing page states "PDFs start at $4.00/page" in the document remediation price block and "PDFs start at $7.50 per page" in the FAQ further down the same page. That is the same vendor quoting two numbers 1.875 times apart in one document, which is worth knowing before you build a budget on either. Get the rate confirmed in writing. For a marketing brochure or an annual report, per page is a sensible way to buy. For documents your software generates, it is a trap, because the volume never stops.

Run the numbers on a six page monthly account statement. At the rates above that is $24 to $48 per document, so a product issuing 500 statements a month is looking at $12,000 to $24,000 a month, forever, to hand remediate output that its own renderer produced badly. At 10,000 documents a month the figure is absurd on its face. Nobody signs that invoice, which means in practice the documents simply go untested, and the ACR quietly rates the interface while saying nothing useful about the files the product actually sends to customers.

Generated documents are the one part of an accessibility program with genuinely good economics, and the reason is structural. You do not have four hundred broken files. You have one broken template rendered four hundred times. Put real semantic structure in that template, heading levels in order, real lists, tables with header cells and a scope attribute, alt text on meaningful images and empty alt on decorative ones, a language attribute on the html element, then switch tagging on at render time and set a document title in the metadata. That work is measured in days and it corrects every document the system will ever produce, including the ones that do not exist yet. Our comparison of accessible PDF generation covers which HTML to PDF engines emit tagged output and which actually target PDF/UA, and testing PDF accessibility covers how to verify what came out rather than what you intended.

Say that plainly to whoever is scoping your audit. Ask them to price the template, not the archive. Most will, because it is a better job for them too. What the audit itself should cost, from the two providers in the category that publish a full rate card, is on our ADA compliance audit cost comparison.

Which parts can you complete in house?

More than most vendors realise. There is no accreditation for VPAT authorship, no licensing body and no government approval step. ITI recommends the manufacturer do the testing on the grounds that the Original Equipment Manufacturer is likely the best source to conduct it, and a self assessment is both legitimate and the norm.

The split that works in practice:

• Do in house: the automated checks, contrast measurement across your palette, tagging and metadata configuration in your render pipeline, template structure fixes, and the first draft of the remarks column. Nobody outside your team can write those remarks well.
• Buy: the manual assistive technology testing and an expert review of your completed draft. This is where an outside specialist earns their fee, because they have read hundreds of these and will spot the confident wrong answers, which are the ones that cause trouble.
• Skip: editions you do not need, AAA rows you are not asked for, and remediation of pre existing archived documents until you have fixed the pipeline producing new ones.

That last one deserves emphasis because it inverts how most projects get scoped. Under the Department of Justice ADA Title II rule, conventional electronic documents posted before a covered entity's compliance date carry an exception unless they are currently used to apply for or access a service. Documents created after the date do not. The archive is often the lower priority and the daily pipeline is the higher one.

How to get a VPAT, in order

1. Find out which standard the buyer names. It is written in their solicitation. That decides your edition, and it is the cheapest decision in the whole process to get right.
2. Fix the obvious before you pay for testing. Contrast, heading order, alt text, table headers, document language, tagging switched on. Every one of those found by an auditor at $200 a screen is money spent discovering something a free tool would have told you.
3. Scope the audit to include your generated documents. Name the templates. If your product emits invoices, statements or reports, they are Electronic Documents under the Revised 508 Standards and they belong in the same tables as your interface.
4. Get quotes from at least three providers. Two of the four we checked will not give you a number without a conversation, so expect this to take a week.
5. Write the remarks yourself, then have them reviewed. Specific, candid remarks on a Partially Supports row read as a vendor who did the work. A wall of Supports with empty remarks reads as untested to anyone who evaluates these regularly, and buyers do compare them side by side.
6. Version it and diary the next review. Section508.gov states that every time your product is changed or updated, including a version change or a bug fix, an updated ACR may be required to address changes in accessibility.

That last step is the one that quietly decides whether the money was well spent. An ACR is a dated claim about a specific product version, and it ages the way every other vendor document in a procurement file ages. It ends up in the same folder as your W-9, your security questionnaire and your certificate of insurance, and a buyer's compliance team will notice a stale date on any of them. Tie the report to a release, review it on a schedule, and re-test whenever a release touches templates, rendering configuration, component libraries or color.

Is a VPAT worth paying for?

If you sell to federal agencies, state government, public universities, school districts or health systems, yes, and the calculation is not close. Section508.gov puts it about as bluntly as a government website ever does: it is not voluntary to complete an ACR if you wish the government to consider purchasing your product. A few thousand dollars against being screened out of a bid before anyone opens your pricing is not a difficult trade.

If you sell purely to small private businesses, the pressure is lower today and rising. Large enterprise buyers increasingly push their own accessibility obligations down to suppliers, and the request tends to arrive at the worst possible moment, two weeks before a contract is signed, when there is no time to test anything properly. Producing one at your own pace costs less than producing one at somebody else's.

The short version

Expect $350 to $950 for the report and $1,250 to $2,750 for the audit that has to sit underneath it, based on the two rate cards on this market that are actually published. Most providers will not quote you without a call, which is the same pattern we found across the accessibility platforms: only accessiBe publishes a price while UserWay, AudioEye and Level Access publish none. The report fee is close to a fixed market rate and the audit is where quotes diverge, so scope that carefully. And if your product generates PDFs, do not buy remediation by the page for output you can fix at the source: one template and one render setting corrects every document you will ever send.