What an Accessibility Audit Costs, and Why Quotes Vary So Much

Ask three firms to audit the same site and you will get three prices that do not look like they are for the same thing. Often they are not.

The word audit covers everything from a scanner export with a logo on it to weeks of human testing. Before comparing numbers, work out which one you are being quoted for.

The Four Things Sold as an Audit

The ranges below are what we see, from quotes owners bring us and from what is published on vendor sites. There is no authoritative price index for this work, so treat anybody presenting one as an industry benchmark with the same suspicion you would apply to us. Ours run lower than most published ranges, which is a fact about our pricing rather than about the market.

Row one is the one to watch. It is genuinely useful as a starting point, and it is not an audit, and the reason is not a matter of taste. A conformance answer has to be per rule, and 24 of the 55 criteria at Level A and AA have no automated rule written against them at all. No amount of scanning produces an answer for those, because there is nothing to run. Paying for a scanner export is paying for something you can run yourself for free.

What Actually Drives the Price

Six things, in roughly this order of impact:

• Number of distinct templates, not number of pages. Four hundred blog posts on one template is one template. A home page, a product page, a checkout and a dashboard is four, and each needs testing separately.
• Interactive complexity. A brochure site is straightforward. A booking flow with a calendar, a seat picker and a payment step is where the hours go.
• How many steps are in your process. Conformance runs across every page in a process, so a checkout only conforms if all four of its steps do. That is four pieces of work, not one, and it is the driver most quotes underestimate.
• Whether a real screen reader user is involved. In our own cost structure this is the single biggest line item, and it is the single biggest difference in what gets found.
• Depth of the deliverable. A list of problems costs less than a report that screenshots each one, names the rule it breaks, and hands your developer the fix.
• Retesting. Verifying the fixes landed is separate work, and some firms include it while others bill it again.

One driver hides inside the first. A responsive template that presents a different layout at a different screen size has to conform in each of those variations independently, so a template with a genuinely different mobile arrangement is closer to two templates than one. Worth asking about explicitly, because a quote priced on desktop compositions is priced for half the job.

What a Cheap Audit Leaves Out

Not corners cut so much as scope quietly narrowed. In quotes we have seen owners bring us, the things missing are consistent:

• Sampling instead of coverage. "Top 10 issues" means nobody checked the other rules.
• No screen reader user. A developer imitating one finds a fraction of what a daily user finds.
• No evidence. Findings with no screenshots and no element references leave your developers hunting.
• No fix guidance. A list of failures without the fixes moves the problem rather than solving it.
• No record of the result rule by rule. A client or a regulator asking whether you meet Level AA is asking about 55 separate answers, so check what form the results arrive in before you buy. Ours are set out per package on the pricing page.

What We Charge, and Why

Two fixed prices rather than one. Rapid is $499 for up to 10 pages you choose, with the report in 5 business days. Standard is $1,499 for up to 25 pages, in 10 business days. No retainer and no subscription behind either, and the re-audit is half price within 3 months.

Three passes go into both. An automated scan, an expert review working through the judgment calls across all 55 WCAG 2.2 A and AA rules, and a session with a professional blind screen-reader user on your key journeys. Every finding is screenshotted, mapped to the rule it breaks, and linked to a fix guide from our library of 432. Where the two packages differ is how many pages fit and how the results are recorded, and that comparison belongs on the pricing page where it is set out line by line rather than summarised here. You can also read a full sample report before you buy anything.

It is a flat rate because the alternative is an hourly estimate that neither of us can hold you to, and because a fixed number lets you decide in one conversation instead of three. One thing the price never includes is the repair work. We audit and we never fix, so nobody here is later marking their own homework.

Then comes the question this page cannot answer, which is what the fixing costs once you know what is broken. That number is nobody's to publish, because it depends on how many templates you have rather than on how many pages, and on whether your documents are in scope. What remediation costs and how long it takes sets out the four things that decide it and walks you through estimating your own.

What the Turnaround Clock Actually Measures

Five business days and 10 business days are the testing windows, and both run from the moment payment clears, which for a card paid at order is usually minutes after you press the button. We confirm the exact page list by email the same day, and a full refund stands until work starts. The clock pauses if something stops the testers, like the site going down or a country block, which is written into the order page rather than kept for the small print.

So the honest way to read a turnaround figure, ours or anybody else's, is to ask what it is measured from. A quote of five days from a scope call is a different promise from five days from a signature, and neither is comparable to a number that starts once your staging credentials arrive. What moves the real date is usually access rather than testing capacity.

Beyond those two packages the schedule stops being a published number, because page count is only one input. Templates, journey length, how many states sit behind a login and how much evidence the report carries all move it, and a bigger engagement is quoted rather than listed. Anybody offering same-day turnaround on a conformance answer is quoting for a scanner export, which arrives in minutes and answers a different question.

The Tax Credit Most US Businesses Miss

US small businesses can claim the Disabled Access Credit under section 44 of the tax code, and the eligibility test is more generous than the summary versions suggest. You qualify if, in the preceding tax year, your gross receipts did not exceed $1,000,000, or you employed no more than 30 full-time employees. Full-time there means at least 30 hours a week for 20 or more weeks, so a business with forty part-timers may still be inside it.

The credit is 50% of eligible spending above $250 and up to $10,250 in a year, which caps it at $5,000. And it is a credit rather than a deduction, so it comes off your tax bill directly. On a $499 audit that works out at $124.50 back, taking the real cost to about $375.

One honest caveat, and your accountant will raise it if we do not. The statute lists categories of eligible expenditure aimed at complying with the ADA and does not name web accessibility work anywhere. An audit is a defensible fit and it is not a certainty, so confirm it with your accountant rather than with us. None of this is tax advice. Our tax credit calculator works out your number, and our explainer covers what qualifies.