How many adults report a disability, which types are most common, and how that has shifted since 2016. The numbers most accessibility business cases are built on, with the caveats that usually get dropped.
Headline finding
28.7% of United States adults report a disability, about 73.4 million people. Cognitive disability is now the largest category at 13.9%, having overtaken mobility and grown faster than any other type.
Source: CDC Disability and Health Data System (DHDS). Age-adjusted prevalence from BRFSS. Disability types overlap and must not be summed.
Executive summary
More than one in four United States adults reports a disability. The composition is the part that tends to surprise teams: cognitive disability is the largest single category and the fastest growing, while vision, where most accessibility effort concentrates, is the smallest of the major types.
This is public domain federal data, pulled directly from the CDC data API rather than transcribed from a secondary source.
28.7% report a disability, an estimated 73,434,428 people, up from 24.6% in 2016.
13.9% in 2022, up from 10.8% in 2016. It overtook mobility, which stayed roughly flat.
People report multiple disability types, so the individual figures overlap. Only the any-disability number is a valid total.
Cognitive disability is now the most commonly reported type at 13.9%, ahead of mobility. That ordering matters for the web: cognitive and learning disabilities are the least well served by the checklist-driven approach most teams take, and the hardest to catch with automated testing.
33,183,737 adults
34,073,740 adults
19,570,433 adults
17,692,113 adults
14,434,811 adults
9,526,478 adults
Reported disability rose from 24.6% to 28.7% of United States adults over this period, and cognitive disability drove most of it, climbing from 10.8% to 13.9%. Mobility, by contrast, is roughly flat. The 2020 dip across every series is a survey artifact, not a real fall.
Interpretation
Accessibility work still skews heavily toward screen reader support. The prevalence data does not.
13.9% of adults, roughly 33 million people, and the fastest growing. Yet cognitive accessibility is the area with the fewest testable success criteria and almost no automated coverage. Plain language, consistent navigation, generous timeouts, and forgiving forms matter more than any ARIA attribute here.
At 5.5% it is real and it matters, but it is smaller than cognitive, mobility, independent living, and hearing. Most people in this group have low vision rather than blindness, so contrast, text resizing, and reflow do more good than screen reader support alone.
The type percentages sum to more than 28.7% because a person can report several. Never add them together to produce a total, and be careful with any source that does.
For the criteria that serve these groups, see 1.4.3 Contrast and 1.4.10 Reflow for low vision, 3.3.7 Redundant Entry and 3.2.3 Consistent Navigation for cognitive load, captions and transcripts for hearing, and keyboard accessibility for motor disabilities.
Age-adjusted prevalence of disability among US adults aged 18 and over, from BRFSS survey data published through the CDC Disability and Health Data System.
Sample Size
BRFSS survey responses; 132,827 unweighted respondents for the any-disability estimate in 2022
Date Range
2016 to 2022
Last updated: 2026-08-03
Use the research
This is public domain data from the CDC. Cite the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention alongside our analysis.
The PDF contains the prevalence table and the full trend series. The CSV contains one row per disability type and one per year.
Accessibility.build. (2026). US Disability Prevalence. https://accessibility.build/research/disability-statistics
Questions about the data
How to quote these figures without misrepresenting them.
Comprehensive tools, checklists, and guides to help you create inclusive digital experiences