Almost nobody is exempt as an organization. What the laws exempt is content, in short lists of named categories, and the conditions attached to those categories are tighter than the headline suggests. If you are a covered body looking for the sentence that gets your website out of scope, it is very unlikely to be there. What is there is a list of five or six or eight kinds of file and page you do not have to bring up to the standard. Alongside it sits a small number of size thresholds that take an entire company out.
That distinction matters more than any single list, because the two things behave differently. An exemption takes content out of scope before the duty ever attaches to it. A cost defense excuses content the duty has already reached, and it comes with paperwork and a regulator attached. Owners tend to reach for the second when they mean the first, and for the first when only the second could help them. So this page covers exemptions, and undue burden and fundamental alteration covers the defense.
The short version
Content exemptions, not organization exemptions. Five categories under ADA Title II and the same five under HHS Section 504. Six in Colorado. Eight across the European public sector. Five under Germany's private-sector law. Size thresholds exist but they are narrow, and the biggest one, the EU microenterprise rule, covers services and not products. Two countries let you apply for a temporary exemption. New Zealand publishes that it has no such process at all.
Exemptions Come in Three Different Shapes
Before any list makes sense, it helps to know that the word covers three unrelated mechanisms, and that a comparison table lining them up next to each other would be lying to you. Knowing which shape you are looking at tells you what to check.
- Content exemptions name a kind of file or page and lift the technical standard off it. Old PDFs, content somebody else posted, live video. This is the common shape and it is what the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands all use.
- Entity exemptions take a whole organization out, usually by counting its staff or its turnover. The EU microenterprise rule is the important one. Ontario, Canada, Israel and Korea have their own.
- Criterion exemptions leave every page in scope but switch off named WCAG rules for everybody. Norway does this with three success criteria. Ontario does it with two. New Zealand modifies four and exempts two things outright.
One more thing decides how far any of this reaches, and it is a WCAG rule rather than a legal one. Conformance is defined for a web page. A claim may cover one page, a series of pages or many related pages, and the standard says so in terms, but every page inside that claim has to conform on its own. So an exempt category never makes your site exempt. It removes particular pages and files from the count, and everything else is judged exactly as it was before. The conformance requirements set out why the unit is the page.
ADA Title II Exempts Five Categories, and Two Carry Conditions
If you are a state or local government body in the United States, this is your list. The Department of Justice's web rule names five kinds of content that do not have to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Your deadline is April 26, 2027 if your total population is 50,000 or more, and April 26, 2028 if it is smaller or you are a special district government. Population there is the Census figure for the entity you are part of. The DOJ says in as many words that it is not the number of people you serve. Three of the five are dated to that deadline, so your compliance date is also the line the exemptions are drawn against.
| The exception | What it covers | The condition people miss |
|---|---|---|
| Archived web content | Old content held for reference, research or recordkeeping | Four conditions, all of them. Created before your deadline or reproducing paper or physical media from before it, retained only for reference, unaltered since archiving, and stored in a dedicated area clearly identified as archived. Old content sitting at its original URL is not archived. |
| Preexisting conventional electronic documents | Word processing files, presentations, PDFs and spreadsheets already published before your deadline | It does not apply to documents currently used to apply for, gain access to, or participate in your services. Your forms are not exempt, however old the file is. |
| Content posted by a third party | Comments, reviews and anything else somebody else put on your site | It falls away where the third party posts under a contractual, licensing or other arrangement with you. A vendor you pay is not a third party for this purpose. |
| Individualized, secured conventional electronic documents | Word processing files, presentations, PDFs and spreadsheets about one person, their property or their account | Two conditions and a category. It has to be a conventional electronic document, it has to be about a specific individual, and it has to be password-protected or otherwise secured. A web page behind a login is not a conventional electronic document, and a generic tax leaflet behind one is not individualized. |
| Preexisting social media posts | Posts made before your compliance date | The date is the only test, which makes this the cleanest of the five. Everything you post after the date is in. |
The second row is the one that costs public bodies real money, because it is usually read as covering every old PDF on the site. It does not. A benefit application saved as a PDF in 2019 is a preexisting conventional electronic document and it is still in scope, because people currently use it to apply for a service. Work out which of your old documents people still use to do something, and treat those as in scope no matter what date sits on them.
HHS Section 504 Exempts the Same Five, on a Different Clock
If you take federal health and human services money, you are a recipient under Section 504, and your list is the Title II list with the nouns swapped. Same five categories, same conditions, same carve-back on preexisting documents. The regulation reads as a near copy of the Justice Department's, which is deliberate, because HHS wrote its rule to mirror the Title II rule a few weeks after it landed.
What differs is the clock. HHS dates are May 11, 2027 for recipients with 15 or more employees and May 10, 2028 for those with fewer. So a body that is both a public entity and an HHS recipient, which describes most public hospitals and a lot of county health departments, has one exemption list and two deadlines about a fortnight apart. Title II lands first. Plan against that date and the second one takes care of itself.
One law that follows money, one that does not
Worth separating these, because the exemption question gets asked of the wrong statute constantly. Section 504 follows federal funding. Section 508 does not. Section 508 binds federal agencies and the United States Postal Service, and it incorporates WCAG 2.0 AA rather than 2.1. Taking a federal grant does not put you under 508. It puts you under 504.
Colorado Has Six, and No Archived Content Among Them
Colorado's rules are the interesting variant, because the state copied the federal list and then changed it in three ways that are worth knowing even if you never set foot in Colorado. They show you which parts of the federal list were choices rather than necessities.
Colorado has no archived-content exception. It adds a third condition to the preexisting-documents exception. A document is only exempt if it is also not currently used by employees to do their jobs, which pulls the internal staff handbook back into scope. And two of its six are not content categories at all. One is a substantially-equivalent-access test and the other imports the closed-functionality exceptions from Section 508, which is how kiosks and self-service machines are dealt with.
Colorado also writes the closing rule down more plainly than anyone else, and it is the rule that ought to be printed at the top of every list on this page. Where an exception applies, the entity is released only from the technical standard. It stays obliged to make the technology accessible by one of the other routes the rules allow, unless it can show undue hardship, undue burden, fundamental alteration or a direct threat. An exception moves you from one obligation to another. It does not end anything.
The European Public Sector Runs on One List of Eight
The United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands and Ireland all publish what looks like a national exemption list, and it is the same list, because all four transpose the same European directive on public sector websites. Read one and you have read them all. The United Kingdom's version, in regulation 4 of the 2018 accessibility regulations, lists eight lettered categories.
- Office file formats published before September 23, 2018, unless the content is needed for active administrative processes relating to the body's tasks. That last clause is the European cousin of the American carve-back, and it works the same way.
- Pre-recorded time-based media published before September 23, 2020. Audio and video, dated.
- Live time-based media. Live audio and video, with no date attached, which makes this the broadest of the eight.
- Online maps and mapping services, as long as essential information is provided accessibly in digital form for maps intended for navigation.
- Third-party content that is neither funded nor developed by, nor under the control of, the public sector body. All three have to be true.
- Reproductions of heritage collection items that cannot be made fully accessible, either because accessibility would clash with preserving the item or with the authenticity of the reproduction, or because no automated and cost-efficient way exists to extract the text.
- Extranet and intranet content published before September 23, 2019, and only until that site undergoes a substantial revision. This one expires the moment you rebuild.
- Content of websites and mobile applications qualifying as archives, meaning a site that only holds content not needed for active administrative processes and has not been updated or edited since September 23, 2019.
Alongside those eight sit three exemptions for whole bodies rather than for content. Public service broadcasters and their subsidiaries are out. Non-governmental organizations are out, unless they provide services essential to the public or services specifically addressing the needs of people with disabilities. Schools and nurseries are mostly out, except for content relating to essential online administrative functions, which means the term-dates page and the parent portal stay in while the rest of the site does not.
Denmark's eight are the same eight in a different order, and the Netherlands is the same again. Denmark adds its own body-level exclusions for education institutions outside the public administration and for private daycare. It also makes its regulator the judge of whether a body was entitled to claim the burden exception in the first place. If you are comparing two European public sector regimes and the content lists look identical, that is because they are, and the differences you actually need to find are in who is covered and who enforces it.
Germany's Private-Sector List Runs to Five, and the EAA Names No WCAG Version
The European Accessibility Act has applied since June 28, 2025, and it reaches private companies rather than public bodies. It is transposed separately in every member state, and it names no WCAG version anywhere in its text. So there is no single European private-sector exemption list to quote. There are national ones, and Germany's is the clearest to read.
Germany excludes five kinds of content. Recorded time-based media published before June 28, 2025. Office application file formats published before that date. Online maps and mapping services, provided essential information for navigational maps is available accessibly in digital form. Third-party content the operator neither finances nor develops nor controls. And archive content, defined inline as content neither updated nor revised after June 28, 2025.
Five, not eight, and the three missing ones tell you something. Live media, heritage collections and intranets are all public-sector concerns, so the private-sector law drops them. If you are a European business trying to work out your position from a public-sector guidance page, that mismatch is the first thing that will mislead you.
The Size Thresholds That Take a Whole Company Out
Entity exemptions are rarer than owners hope and narrower than they read. The European microenterprise rule is the one most people are looking for, and it has two traps in it.
| Regime | The threshold | What it actually gets you |
|---|---|---|
| European Accessibility Act | Fewer than 10 people, and either turnover of at most 2 million euros or a balance sheet total of at most 2 million euros | Exemption from the accessibility requirements and from the obligations attached to them, but only for a microenterprise providing services. Make a covered product and you are still bound, with lighter paperwork. |
| Ontario, AODA | 50 or more employees for the web duty, 20 or more for the reporting duty, counting employees in Ontario only | Below 50, the website standard does not bind you. Designated public sector organizations are covered whatever their size. |
| Accessible Canada Act | An average of 99 or fewer employees over the previous three calendar years | Out of the web page, mobile app, document, training, statement and procurement requirements. Planning and reporting duties still apply. |
| Israel | Average annual turnover under a published figure, applied automatically since 2017 rather than on application | A permanent turnover floor below which the duty does not bite, plus a separate higher floor below which video accessibility is not required. |
| Colorado | 25 or fewer employees and no more than $3,500,000 in annual gross income | Not an exemption. A 50% reduction in the statutory fine for correcting within 30 days, and it does not apply where the barrier was made knowingly or intentionally. |
The two traps in the European rule are both in the wording. The headcount is joined to the money test by and, so a firm of 11 people with no revenue at all is not a microenterprise. And the exemption reaches services rather than products, which catches out hardware makers who assumed a small team was enough.
Several major regimes have no size threshold at all, and it is worth naming them because the absence surprises people. The UK Equality Act has none. Brazil's law has none. Ireland's employment equality duty has none, so a firm of three owes the same reasonable accommodation a firm of three thousand does. Japan's law reaches organizations whether they are for-profit or not and whether they are incorporated or a single individual.
Norway, Ontario and New Zealand Switch Off Rules Instead of Content
The third shape is the one that catches auditors out, because a page can be fully in scope while a named WCAG rule has been lifted off it for everybody in the country. You cannot spot this from the content. You have to read the standard the law incorporated.
Norway excepts three success criteria from the standard itself, and it is easiest to name them by number. Those are 1.2.3, 1.2.4 and 1.2.5, which between them cover media alternatives for prerecorded video, captions on live audio, and audio description. The same three exceptions apply to public broadcasters, which puts the national broadcaster on the same bar as a private company rather than a higher one. Ontario excepts two, live captions and prerecorded audio description, and its rule also applies only where meeting the requirement is practicable.
New Zealand has six exceptions in one section, and only two of them are exemptions. Complex visual maps are exempt from the non-text content rule, with the data expected in open machine-readable form instead, and the definition is narrow enough to exclude a weather map made of sun and cloud icons. Inactive web pages are exempt from conformance entirely, on four conditions including that the page carries accessible instructions for requesting an accessible version. The other four modify named criteria rather than switching them off, mostly by turning a must into a should except where the content carries high-stakes information.
Where You Can Apply for an Exemption, and Where You Cannot
Three answers to the same question, which is why an owner who has read about one country is often confidently wrong about another.
Australia has a formal route. Section 55 of the Disability Discrimination Act lets the Australian Human Rights Commission grant a temporary exemption by instrument, on application. It is time-limited and it is a real, lawful way to be non-compliant for a defined period. Israel has a different gatekeeper. A certified service accessibility auditor can confirm in a written expert opinion that a particular adjustment cannot be achieved for technological reasons, and the entity is then exempt from that adjustment. Israel is unusual in having built a licensed professional role into the exemption process.
New Zealand says the opposite in plain words, and its wording is the most useful sentence any regulator has published on this subject. There is no process by which a mandated organization can secure an exemption from the requirement to meet the Standard. Each organization is responsible for meeting it and accepts the risks of not doing so. Nobody in the United States, the United Kingdom or the European Union has an application process either. The absence is the norm and Australia is the outlier.
What Being Exempt Actually Gets You
Less than it sounds, and this is the part worth carrying away. Every regime that grants a content exemption keeps some duty alive behind it. Colorado says it outright, that an exempted item still has to be made accessible by one of the other routes. The United Kingdom requires a body claiming disproportionate burden to name the unmet parts of the requirement in its published accessibility statement. It also has to provide accessible alternatives to documents that are not on the site, where that is appropriate. New Zealand's inactive-page exemption is conditional on the page telling readers how to ask for an accessible version.
So the practical effect of an exemption is a swap. The duty to make that content meet the standard becomes a duty to have a plan for the person who needs it anyway. A request will still arrive. Somebody will need last year's minutes, or the old form, or the archived report, and an exemption is not an answer to that person. It is only an answer to the auditor asking whether the page meets WCAG 2.1 Level AA.
That is also why the cheapest thing you can do with this page is write your exemptions down. Not to defend them, just to know what you have claimed. Which documents you are treating as preexisting, which pages you are calling archived and where the archive area actually is, which content is third-party and whether any of those parties are under contract to you. The list takes an afternoon and it is the thing you will be asked for first. An accessibility statement is where most of it belongs.
Where This Page Stops
Every list here is the published law as we read it, and none of it is legal advice. Two things in particular need a lawyer rather than a guide. Whether a specific document of yours falls inside a specific exception is a question about your facts, and the conditions attached to these categories are exactly the kind of thing that turns on detail. And whether you are a covered body at all, especially where you sit across regimes or across borders, is a question that decides everything else. Which laws apply to you is the right starting point for the second one. A lawyer in your jurisdiction is the right finish for both.