How Much Does a Web Accessibility Audit Cost?

The Honest Answer: What Audits Actually Cost

There is no standard price for a web accessibility audit, and any page that gives you a single confident number without a source is guessing. What we can do is tell you what is actually published, who published it, and what our own audits cost.

• Published US figures. US vendors such as AudioEye and DigitalA11Y publish ranges of roughly $1,500 to $5,500 for small business sites, per-page rates around $100 to $250, and $50,000 or more for large enterprise engagements. These are US market figures from vendor-published content, not quotes, and your site may sit anywhere on or off those ranges depending on scope.
• The one published UK data point we know of. Independent UK consultant Jim Byrne publishes audit prices from 2,500 GBP. Beyond that, published UK and Irish pricing is genuinely scarce: most agencies and consultancies quote on request only, which makes it hard for buyers to compare offers or even sanity-check a quote. We would rather say that plainly than invent a UK market rate that does not exist in print.
• Our pricing. We publish ours: fixed-price WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility audits from $950, including manual testing, assistive technology checks, a full report, and verification retests, with each tier and what it covers listed on the service page.

The spread between those numbers is not vendors being greedy or cheap. It reflects genuinely different products sold under the same word, which is why the next section matters more than any headline figure.

What Drives the Price

Audit effort, and therefore cost, scales on a handful of structural factors. When you request quotes, these are the variables each vendor is silently estimating:

• Unique templates and page types, not raw page count. A 10,000-page site built from 12 templates is a smaller job than a 40-page site where every page is bespoke. Auditors test representative instances of each template, so template count is the real unit of work.
• User flows. Checkout, signup, login, account management, and search each need end-to-end testing with keyboard and screen reader, because a flow can fail even when every individual page in it passes.
• Depth of testing. An automated scan, a manual audit with screen reader testing, and a full assistive-technology matrix across multiple screen readers, browsers, and magnification tools are three different price brackets.
• Platforms. Web only is the baseline. Adding iOS and Android apps or a library of PDFs adds testers, tooling, and time.
• Deliverables. A raw defect list is cheaper than a full report with remediation guidance, which is cheaper than also producing a VPAT or Accessibility Conformance Report for procurement.
• Retesting rounds. Verifying fixes is real work. Check whether a retest is included or billed separately; a quote without one is not comparable to a quote with one.
• Day rates. Much of the market prices audits as consultancy days, so the same scope costs different amounts at different firms simply because their day rates differ.

This is also why per-page pricing can mislead: two vendors quoting the same per-page rate can produce wildly different totals depending on how they count pages, templates, and flow states.

Automated vs Manual: Why the Cheap Number Is Not the Same Product

The cheapest audits on the market are automated scans dressed up as audits. Automated testing is cheap or free for a reason: it can only detect a subset of WCAG failures, the ones a machine can judge without context. It can tell you an image has no alt attribute; it cannot tell you the alt text that is there is wrong. It can find a form field with no label; it cannot tell you the checkout is impossible to complete with a keyboard.

Manual testing, with a human working through your site using a keyboard and screen reader, is where both the cost and the value of a professional audit live. That is the part you are actually paying for, and the part a scan-only product quietly omits while using the same word.

The smart move is to use both, in order. Run our free URL accessibility auditor and contrast checker to establish a baseline before paying anyone. Fix what they find, then spend your audit budget on the manual testing that machines cannot do.

What a Proper Audit Should Include

Whatever you pay, the deliverable should contain the same core elements. Use this as a checklist when comparing quotes:

• A written scope: which templates, pages, and user flows were tested, on which browsers and assistive technologies.
• Testing against WCAG 2.2 Level AA, the current version of the standard, with each finding mapped to a specific success criterion.
• Manual and assistive technology testing, including screen reader and keyboard-only passes, not just scanner output.
• A usable report: severity ratings, evidence, and plain-language remediation guidance a developer can act on without an accessibility background.
• A verification retest after fixes, so you end with evidence that issues were resolved rather than a list of things that were once wrong.

Never buy a report sight unseen. We publish a sample audit report so you can see exactly what the deliverable looks like; ask any vendor you are considering for the same.

How to Keep the Cost Down Without Buying Junk

1. Arrive with a template inventory. List your unique page types and key user flows before requesting quotes. Vendors who do not have to guess at scope quote tighter, and you can compare offers on an identical scope.
2. Clear the free findings first. Run automated tools yourself and fix what they surface. Paying a consultant day rate to be told about missing alt attributes is the most expensive possible way to learn something a free scan reports in seconds.
3. Scope by flow, not by everything. If budget is tight, audit the flows where users and legal risk concentrate first (home, search, product, checkout, signup) and phase the rest.
4. Do not spend the budget on an overlay instead. Overlay widgets do not make a site conform to WCAG and do not remove the need for an audit; our overlay guide explains why. Money spent there is money you will spend again on real remediation.
5. Buy the retest. Skipping verification to save money means you cannot prove anything was fixed, which undermines the point of paying for the audit at all.

UK and Ireland Specifics

For UK and Irish organisations, the question behind the price question is legal exposure, and the drivers on this side of the Atlantic are different from the US lawsuit machine:

• The Equality Act 2010 (UK). Service providers owe an anticipatory duty to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people, meaning you are expected to have addressed barriers before a disabled customer encounters them, not after a complaint. Our UK compliance guide covers how this applies to websites.
• The European Accessibility Act. In force since June 2025 for in-scope products and services, with enforcement that in Ireland includes criminal penalties. Our EAA Ireland guide explains who is in scope and what is required.

Weigh the audit price against the cost of not knowing where you stand. For the US picture, where an inaccessible site can turn directly into legal spend, see our ADA website lawsuit cost guide. And an audit is not only risk avoidance: accessible sites reach more customers, and our accessibility ROI calculator lets you put your own numbers on that.

One practical note on the quote-on-request culture: because so few UK and Irish firms publish prices, the burden of making quotes comparable falls on you. Send every vendor the same written scope, insist on an itemised quote against it, and ask for a sample report. That is the closest thing this market offers to price transparency.

Frequently Asked Questions