What a website accessibility demand letter actually costs — and how to avoid one

Almost nobody's first contact with website accessibility law is a lawsuit. It's a letter — usually from a law firm you've never heard of, usually citing WCAG 2.1, usually giving you a deadline. Understanding what that letter actually costs, and why it exists, makes the decision to check your site before one arrives a lot easier.

The letter is the business model

Most of these cases never reach a judge. A demand letter is a settlement offer with a deadline attached, and most businesses pay it rather than litigate — which is exactly why the volume of letters keeps climbing. Federal website accessibility lawsuits topped 3,100 in 2025, up roughly 27% from the year before, and that count doesn't include the much larger volume of demand letters that get settled quietly and never show up in a court filing at all.

What it actually costs

• Settling a demand letter before it becomes a filed case: commonly reported in the $5,000–$50,000 range, depending on your market and how quickly you respond.
• Letting it become actual litigation: legal defense, required remediation, and ongoing monitoring commitments routinely push total exposure to $55,000–$270,000 or more — numbers that would be a serious event for most small businesses.
• Running a scan and fixing what it finds before any letter arrives: free to start, and the fixes themselves are often the few-minutes-each kind covered in "the accessibility mistakes we see on almost every small business site."

You don't have to be a big brand to get one

The assumption that this only happens to large companies doesn't hold up. The majority of defendants in recent years have been small and mid-sized businesses, not national chains — and once a business has been sued once, it's meaningfully more likely to be sued again, since plaintiff's firms frequently work from lists of previously-targeted sites. Being small doesn't take you off the list; it just means the letter, when it comes, is proportionally a much bigger hit.

The cheap insurance that actually works

You can't make yourself lawsuit-proof — nobody can, and anyone promising a certificate that guarantees it is selling something that doesn't exist (see "is your website legally required to be accessible?"). What you can do is close the obvious, easy gaps before a plaintiff's firm finds them for you: run a scan, fix the handful of common issues it flags, and check again periodically rather than once and never again. That pattern — scan, fix, re-check — is a fundamentally cheaper habit than waiting for a letter to make the decision for you.

None of this is legal advice, and if a letter has already landed in your inbox, talk to an attorney before you do anything else. But if one hasn't arrived yet, this is the exact window where a free scan is worth ten minutes of your time.