What a Website Accessibility Audit Costs — and the $5,000 Tax Credit Most Small Businesses Miss

Two questions come up every time a small business starts looking at website accessibility: what does an audit cost, and is there any help paying for it. Most agencies answer the first with “it depends” and never mention the second. Here are straight answers to both, including the part of the tax credit that gets misrepresented constantly.

What an accessibility audit actually costs

Across the industry, audits run anywhere from about $1,500 to $25,000. That spread is real, not padding — it tracks how many unique page templates you have and, more importantly, how much genuine manual testing is involved. Automated scanners catch somewhere around a third of WCAG issues. The rest requires a human driving a screen reader and a keyboard, which is where the hours go.

Our tiers, so you have a concrete reference point:

Audit — from $1,500. A WCAG 2.1/2.2 AA assessment, automated plus manual, with a prioritized report and a fix roadmap you can hand to any developer. You are not locked into us for the fixes.

Audit + Remediation — from $4,500. We implement the fixes and re-test to conformance, so the site is actually accessible rather than merely documented.

Compliance Care — from $355/mo. Quarterly re-audits, monitoring, and priority fixes. Accessibility drifts the moment anyone publishes new content, so this exists for sites that change often.

One thing worth saying plainly: an overlay widget is not an audit. The one-line-of-JavaScript products that promise instant compliance have been the subject of a large share of accessibility lawsuits, not a shield against them. If a vendor tells you a script makes you compliant, that is the moment to walk.

The tax credit: IRS Form 8826

The Disabled Access Credit exists to help small businesses pay for removing barriers for people with disabilities. It is claimed on Form 8826 and forms part of the general business credit. Here is exactly how it works, straight off the form.

Who counts as an eligible small business

You qualify if, for the preceding tax year, you either had gross receipts of $1 million or less, or had no more than 30 full-time employees. Either test is enough — you do not need both. The form treats someone as full time if they worked at least 30 hours a week for 20 or more calendar weeks.

How the credit is calculated

The first $250 does not count. Above that, the credit is 50% of your eligible access expenditures, capped at $10,000 of that excess. In practice: spend $10,250 in a year and you reach the maximum credit of $5,000. Spend $4,500 and the credit works out to $2,125 — ($4,500 minus $250) times 50%.

You also cannot take both the credit and a deduction on the same dollars. The form calls this the denial of double benefit — whatever you claim as credit cannot also be deducted as a business expense.

The part nobody mentions

It is nonrefundable. The credit reduces income tax you actually owe. If your liability is zero, the credit gives you nothing back this year, though unused general business credit can generally be carried forward. This is also precisely why nonprofits cannot use it — a tax-exempt organization has no income tax liability for it to offset. If you see an article promising nonprofits a $5,000 accessibility credit, the author did not check.

And the honest caveat on websites. The statute was written in 1990 and its examples are physical — ramps, interpreters, readers, adaptive equipment. It does cover expenditures to make visual materials available to people with visual impairments, which is the language most practitioners point to for web remediation. But the IRS has not published guidance explicitly confirming that website accessibility work qualifies, and the eligible-expenditure rules carry conditions worth reading closely. Anyone who tells you flatly that your site redesign qualifies is overstating it. Bring your invoice and this form to your CPA and let them make the call — that is a genuinely cheap conversation relative to the amounts involved.

Why bother at all

Set the credit aside for a moment. Roughly one in four US adults lives with a disability, and an inaccessible site turns them away silently — no bounce report tells you a screen reader user could not complete your form. The same fixes that make a site usable with a keyboard also tend to make it faster, better structured, and easier for search engines to parse. Accessibility work has a habit of paying for itself in ways that have nothing to do with compliance.

The litigation risk is real too, and it lands on small businesses far more often than people expect. But fear is a bad reason to buy anything. The better one is that a chunk of your potential customers currently cannot use your website, and you would not tolerate that if it were happening at your front door.

Where to start

If you are not sure whether you have a problem yet, start with whether your website is ADA compliant — it covers what the standards actually require and how to spot the obvious failures yourself. When you want a real assessment, our accessibility audit and remediation packages list every tier and what is included, with no mystery quotes.