How much does an accessibility audit cost in 2026?

The range is wider than you'd think

Search "accessibility audit cost" and you'll find numbers all over the place — because "audit" means very different things depending on who's selling it.

What traditional audits actually cost

Agencies and consultancies typically charge €2,000–7,000 for a small-business audit, or price by volume — around €4,000 per 10 pages from firms billing by page count. Full enterprise engagements run €5,000–50,000, priced by scope and timeline.

That reflects genuinely detailed work — checking real markup against every WCAG success criterion by hand doesn't scale cheaply. But it puts a real audit out of reach for a lot of the businesses the EAA actually applies to — which, remember, starts at just above microenterprise size (10 employees, €2m turnover).

What overlay subscriptions cost — and what they don't include

Overlay widgets are priced differently: subscriptions from roughly $490–1,490 a year. Cheaper, but — as covered in our overlay comparison — a subscription to a script isn't the same product as an audit. It doesn't produce the report or statement the EAA's documentation requirements actually ask for.

Where a fixed-price automated audit fits

Automated scanning — real testing against your real markup — covers a meaningful share of WCAG criteria, not all of it. Deque, who maintain the axe-core engine most automated scanners are built on, put automated coverage at roughly 57% of WCAG criteria; practitioners measure closer to 30–40% in real-world use. That's still a large share of the gap closed at a fraction of the price, with a real report attached.

That's the gap our audit tiers are built for: €390 for up to 25 pages, €890 for up to 100 — a fixed price, visible before you sign up, with the coverage limitation stated on the report cover, not hidden.

An automated audit gives you a prioritized, evidence-based starting point — grounded in what your actual markup does, with the exact WCAG criteria and pages that need attention, not a generic checklist.

What actually moves the price, page by page

Two sites with the same page count can come back at very different prices, because "audit cost" scales with what's actually on the page, not just how many URLs there are:

• Interactive complexity. A static marketing page is cheap to check. A checkout flow, a multi-step form, a custom date picker, or a dashboard with live-updating widgets all need separate testing per state, not just per page — each interaction is effectively its own surface.
• PDFs and documents. A downloadable PDF brochure or a data table exported to Excel needs its own accessibility check; it doesn't inherit anything from the page that links to it. Sites with a lot of document downloads (finance, government-adjacent, education) often see this be the biggest line item in a manual quote.
• Custom components vs. a known framework. A site built on WordPress or Shopify with mostly stock theme components is faster to audit than one with a bespoke design system, because a known framework's common failure modes are already well understood by whoever's testing it.
• One-time vs. ongoing. A single audit tells you where you stand today. The EAA requirement to maintain accessibility means a site that changes often (new pages, new campaigns, redesigns) will drift back out of compliance without a repeat check — which is the difference between a one-off report and a monitoring subscription.

What it costs to skip one

The other side of "is €390–890 worth it" is what happens without it. Enforcement varies by EU member state — see what happens if you don't comply, by country for the actual figures — but every member state's transposition law gives its market-surveillance authority the power to fine, and several also allow private consumer complaints. An audit report is also the evidence base for the accessibility statement Annex V of the EAA requires every in-scope service to publish — without one, there's nothing to base that statement on beyond guesswork.

Frequently asked

Is an automated scan accurate enough on its own?
It accurately reports what it tests — but automated tooling structurally can't catch everything WCAG covers (see the coverage figures above). Treat it as the fast, cheap first pass that tells you exactly where the real problems are, not as a substitute for a full manual review if your business is large enough that a false negative carries real legal exposure.

How long does an audit take?
An automated scan of a small site typically finishes in minutes, not weeks — that's the main practical difference from a manual agency engagement, which usually runs 1–4 weeks depending on scope and how backed up the auditor is.

Do I need a manual audit if I've already run an automated one?
Depends on your risk tolerance and size. A microenterprise near the EAA's size threshold gets proportionally more value from a fast, cheap automated baseline. A larger business with real legal exposure often uses an automated audit to find and fix the bulk of issues cheaply, then brings in manual review for the remainder automated tools can't see — things like whether alt text actually describes an image meaningfully, or whether a screen-reader user can complete a task in a sensible order.

What's actually in Cluesia's report?
The exact WCAG success criteria that failed, on which specific pages, with the offending markup — not a generic checklist or a percentage score with no detail behind it.

See exact pricing →