Quotes for accessibility work range from nothing to six figures for what sounds like the same sentence. The spread is real, and it comes from four different products being sold under one word.
Here is what each one is, roughly what it costs, and how to tell which one you need — which is usually not the most expensive one.
The four things called an audit
Prices below are typical European market rates in 2026 for a mid-sized site. Treat them as bands, not quotes.
- —Automated scan — €0 to about €150/month. Covers roughly a third of WCAG, continuously, across every page. Finds contrast, missing names, structural errors.
- —Expert manual audit — €3,000 to €15,000 one-off. A specialist works through a sample of templates against every criterion, keyboard and screen reader included. Produces a findings report.
- —Audit with disabled users — €8,000 to €30,000. The above plus sessions with people who actually use assistive technology. Finds usability problems that conformance testing does not.
- —VPAT / Accessibility Conformance Report — €4,000 to €20,000. A formal document in a specific format, usually demanded by enterprise or government procurement.
Which one you need
The honest answer for most SMBs and agencies: start with the cheapest, because it removes the noise the expensive one would otherwise spend its hours counting.
- doNothing in place yet → automated scanning. It finds the bulk of individual failures in a minute and costs less than an hour of consultancy.
- doA compliance deadline or a complaint → expert manual audit, but run automated testing first so you pay for judgement rather than for tallying contrast errors.
- doSelling to enterprise or government → a VPAT, because procurement will ask for the document by name.
- doA product where accessibility is core to the value → user testing. Nothing else tells you whether the thing is actually usable.
The cost nobody quotes for
An audit produces a list. Fixing the list is the expensive part, and it is usually two to five times the audit fee depending on how much of it is template work versus content work.
This is the strongest argument for continuous testing: fixing a contrast failure in the sprint that introduced it costs minutes. Fixing it eighteen months later, after it has propagated through four hundred pages and a design system, costs days.
Questions to ask a vendor
The answers separate a real audit from a scan report with a logo on it.
- —How many pages or templates, and chosen how? A sample of five templates is normal; "the whole site" usually means a crawl.
- —What proportion is manual? If the answer is vague, it is a scan.
- —Which assistive technologies, and on which platforms? NVDA on Windows and VoiceOver on macOS and iOS is a reasonable minimum.
- —Does it include re-testing after fixes? Often it does not, and that is a second invoice.
- —What do we get — a findings list, or a remediation plan with code?
Questions
- How much does a WCAG audit cost?
- An expert manual audit of a mid-sized site typically runs €3,000–€15,000 in Europe. Automated monitoring is €0–€150 a month and covers a different, smaller, but continuous part of the problem.
- Is a free accessibility checker good enough?
- For finding the most common failures, yes — automated engines are the same engine, free or paid. What paid monitoring adds is the schedule, the diff against last time, the history and the report. A one-off free check tells you about today.
- Do we need an audit if we already do automated testing?
- Before a compliance deadline or a procurement process, yes: automated testing cannot cover roughly two thirds of the criteria. For ongoing maintenance between audits, automated monitoring is what keeps the audit result from decaying.
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