How much does a WCAG accessibility audit cost in 2026?
Pricing for web accessibility audits in the EU market spans four orders of magnitude — from free automated scans to 100,000+ € enterprise certifications. Here is what each tier actually delivers, what drives the price difference, and what your agency should charge a client.
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TL;DR — the four tiers
Accessibility audit pricing in the EU market in 2026 clusters into four tiers. Knowing which tier you need stops you from paying for certification you will never use, and stops you from buying a scan that cannot answer the question your client asked.
What drives the price
Four factors determine where a given audit lands on the price spectrum:
- Scope — how many pages, flows, and component libraries are tested. A 5-page audit costs a fraction of a 50-page audit. Most agency work sits between 10 and 20 pages.
- Depth of review — purely automated scanning vs. automated + operator review vs. automated + operator review + user testing with people with disabilities. Each layer roughly doubles the cost.
- Output format — machine output (JSON) vs. developer report vs. client-ready PDF with executive summary vs. formal VPAT/ACR certification document. Formal certifications carry significant price premiums because they attach legal weight.
- Continuity — a one-off audit vs. monthly monitoring. Continuous coverage typically runs at 40–60% of the audit price per month for equivalent portfolio size.
Tier 1 — Free tools (0 €)
Free accessibility tools are genuinely useful, but only for the job they were designed for: developer QA during a build. Examples include axe DevTools (browser extension), WAVE (online + browser extension), Lighthouse (built into Chrome DevTools), and Pa11y (command line).
What they do well: surface machine-detectable rule violations like missing alt text, failing color contrast, form label mismatches, and invalid ARIA. Academic research (Deque's own published numbers) pegs automated coverage at around 30–40% of all WCAG issues.
What they do not do: prioritize by business impact, produce a client-ready report, explain the fix in plain English, capture screenshots as evidence, or catch any issue that requires interaction (keyboard traps, focus management, dynamic content, screen reader verbosity). Do not pitch these as a deliverable to a client — you will be explaining for months why the "passing" Lighthouse score did not prevent a complaint.
Tier 2 — SaaS scanners (99–499 €/mo)
The next tier up is subscription SaaS scanners. Typical examples: Accessi.org, Accessibility Checker, UserWay (scan tier, not the overlay widget), and smaller regional players. Pricing runs 99 € to 499 € per month depending on number of pages, sites, and retention of scan history.
These deliver crawled multi-page scans, dashboard views, regression tracking, and exports. Some include remediation guidance generated from a rule database. Very few include human review of the findings before they reach your client.
Good fit for: a single site you maintain, where the dev team wants continuous regression signals. Less good for: client- facing audits where the output needs to be prioritized, framed with business impact, and defensible under a complaint.
Tier 3 — Agency-tier audits (300–1,000 €)
This is the tier AccessiProof sits in, alongside a small number of EU-focused competitors. A paid audit at 399 € typically covers 10–15 key pages, combines axe-core automated scanning with operator-led review of every finding, and ships as a white-label PDF with screenshot evidence, a prioritized remediation roadmap, and effort ranges your dev team can plan against.
The pricing model exists because most 10-to-30-person agencies cannot hire a dedicated accessibility specialist at a 70K+ € salary to audit a handful of client sites per quarter. The productized audit is the middle path — priced to be a line item an account manager can close, with a deliverable a developer can actually work from.
Good fit for: EU agencies doing WCAG 2.1 AA audits on client sites, EAA readiness projects, and retainers that need a recurring compliance line. Less good for: VPAT/ACR certification, legal expert testimony, or deep user testing with people with disabilities (those need tier 4 or 5).
Tier 4 — Boutique specialist firms (1,500–5,000 €)
Boutique accessibility consultancies — specialist firms with IAAP-certified auditors — charge 1,500 € to 5,000 € for a full manual conformance audit of a single product or site. Examples in Europe include Hassell Inclusion, Agency for Accessibility, Eleven Ways, Nomensa, and a long tail of country-specific firms.
What you are paying for at this tier: a human auditor reading every page against every WCAG success criterion, testing with a screen reader and keyboard, interviewing product owners about authenticated flows, and writing findings that stand up to regulatory scrutiny. Turnaround is typically 2–4 weeks.
Good fit for: pre-launch certification for B2B SaaS selling into public-sector procurement, full conformance audits for regulated industries (banking, transport, healthcare), retrospective audits after a complaint has been raised.
Tier 5 — Enterprise specialists (10,000–100,000+ €)
At the top of the market: Level Access, Deque, TetraLogical, TPGi (part of Vispero), and the enterprise arms of the big-five consultancies. Engagement sizes start around EUR 10,000 for a focused VPAT/ACR and scale into six figures for multi-product audits, legal expert engagements, or managed compliance programs.
What you are paying for: specialized auditors with deep platform expertise (iOS, Android, AAA conformance, WAI-ARIA authoring, specific assistive-technology stacks), formal VPAT/ACR documents accepted by US federal and EU public procurement, user testing cohorts with people with disabilities, and often named legal counsel engagement.
Good fit for: procurement-driven accessibility certification, litigation defense, multi-brand enterprise programs. Not a fit for: typical agency client work — the price point and ramp time do not match agency billing cycles.
Pricing red flags
A few pricing models to be wary of when comparing vendors:
- Per-page pricing with no cap on large sites. A 500-page e-commerce site at 15 €/page is 7,500 € before anyone has looked at a single finding. Prefer scope-based pricing with clear page caps.
- Unlimited scans, unlimited sites at a very low monthly rate. Usually signals an overlay widget in disguise, or a shared scan queue with hours-long waits. Ask for a live demo of turnaround time.
- Guaranteed legal compliance from any tool or vendor — even a certified boutique firm. EAA compliance is determined by regulators and courts, not by a vendor's marketing page. Legitimate audits produce evidence; they do not produce verdicts.
- Overlay widgets pitched as "WCAG compliant in 60 seconds". Overlay widgets do not change the underlying HTML. They cannot, by construction, make a non-compliant site compliant. See the Overlay Fact Sheet signed by hundreds of independent accessibility experts for the consensus view.
What to charge your clients
If you are an EU agency reselling accessibility audits into your existing client base, the typical ranges we see in the market are:
Your markup covers the scoping call, the client communication, the remediation oversight, and the risk of fronting the work. Most agencies we talk to underprice their first three audits and correct upward once they see how hard clients push back on the remediation scope, not on the audit price itself.
For detail on how AccessiProof pricing works for agency resale, see the pricing page and the for-agencies page.
Frequently asked questions
What is the typical cost of a WCAG accessibility audit in 2026?
Typical pricing in the EU market falls into four bands. Free tools (axe DevTools, WAVE, Lighthouse) cost 0 € but only surface rule violations. SaaS scan tools range from 99 € to 499 € per month for unlimited scans but without human review. Agency-tier paid audits — like AccessiProof at 399 € — sit between 300 € and 1,000 € and combine automated scanning with operator-led review. Boutique specialist audits run 1,500 € to 5,000 € for a full manual conformance pass. Enterprise VPAT/ACR certification engagements start at 10,000 € and scale to 100,000+ €.
What drives the price difference between tiers?
Four factors: the scope of pages tested, whether findings are human-verified or machine-only, whether screenshots and remediation guidance are included, and whether the output is a formal certification (VPAT/ACR) that can be used in legal or procurement contexts. Certification dominates cost at the enterprise tier; manual review dominates at the boutique tier; scope (number of pages) dominates at the agency tier.
Is a free scan actually useful?
Yes — as a diagnostic, not a deliverable. A free scan tells you whether your site has obvious critical issues (missing alt text, form label failures, color contrast breaks) and gives you a starting point for a budget conversation with your client. It does not give you enough to act on for remediation without additional context and prioritization.
Why are overlay widgets (50-490 €/month) cheaper than audits?
Because they do not fix your site. Overlay widgets inject a JavaScript layer that attempts to patch the DOM at runtime — they do not change the underlying HTML, ARIA, or content. What EN 301 549 and the EAA reference is the underlying service, not a widget on top of it. Widgets also frequently interfere with users' existing assistive technology. See the Overlay Fact Sheet for the accessibility community's consensus on why overlays are not a compliance shortcut.
What should my agency charge a client for a WCAG audit?
EU agencies typically charge clients 800 € to 2,500 € for a 10-15 page WCAG 2.1 AA audit. Your markup covers the scoping call, the client communication, the remediation oversight, and the risk you take on by fronting the work. Full EAA readiness projects — audit + remediation + re-scan — land in the 4,000 € to 15,000 € range for most mid-market clients.
Do I need a boutique firm or is an agency-tier audit enough?
Depends on the outcome you need. For routine WCAG 2.1 AA conformance work as part of a web project, agency-tier audits (automated + operator review) cover the 90% of findings that matter. For legal disputes, VPAT/ACR procurement requirements, expert testimony, or user testing with people with disabilities, go to a boutique firm. The tiers are complementary, not competitive.
Are accessibility audits a one-off cost or recurring?
Both. The initial audit is a one-off. But accessibility is not a ship-and-forget compliance check — content updates, plugin updates, and new features continuously introduce regressions. Most EU agencies now bundle monthly monitoring (typically 99 € to 499 €/mo depending on number of sites) into their client retainers to catch regressions early. The EAA itself expects an ongoing compliance posture, not a one-time certificate.
Price a real client site against this benchmark
Run a free scan on a current client site, then compare the finding count to the agency-tier pricing. It is the fastest way to see what you should actually quote.