Jurisdictions — Americas
ADA website lawsuits in 2025: what the numbers actually say, and what agencies should check
The question US clients are asking
"Can we really get sued over our website?" Yes — at industrial scale, and the numbers are public. Here is what the trackers actually report, without vendor inflation.
What is true, verified
- Thousands of website accessibility lawsuits are filed every year. Seyfarth Shaw's tracker counted 3,117 federal-court website accessibility lawsuits in 2025, up 27% from 2024 — about a third of all ADA Title III federal filings. UsableNet, which also counts New York and California state courts, put the 2025 total at 4,928. New York federal courts alone saw over 1,000.
- There is no federal web regulation for private businesses — and that's the trap. ADA Title III has no technical standard for websites; the de-facto benchmark used in demand letters and settlements is WCAG. "There's no law that says WCAG" is technically true and practically useless as a defense.
- State law raises the stakes. California's Unruh Act adds statutory damages of $4,000 per violation plus attorney's fees (with a physical-nexus requirement after Martinez v. Cot'n Wash, 2022). New York's state and city human rights laws are why NY is the top venue.
- Government sites now have an explicit rule — with extended deadlines. The DOJ's Title II rule requires state and local government web content to meet WCAG 2.1 AA; in April 2026 the DOJ published a rule in the Federal Register extending compliance deadlines to April 26, 2027 (larger entities) and April 26, 2028 (smaller ones). If your client sells to or is a public entity, this is the sharper obligation — check the current dates on ada.gov.
- E-commerce is the main target, and repeat suits are common. The majority of web suits hit online stores, and a large share of defendants had been sued before — settling once without fixing the site does not close the risk.
How to check a client site yourself
- Accessibility signals: run an automated WCAG checker (axe-core is the open-source standard) on the key templates — home, product page, checkout, contact form. Automated checks catch what complaints cite first: missing alt text, unlabelled form fields, contrast failures.
- Consent posture: load the site cold and note what fires before any consent, and whether the privacy policy matches (state privacy laws — CCPA/CPRA and successors — are their own exposure).
- Broken links and SEO basics: cover the 404s and missing metadata in the same pass.
- Document what you saw: capture the page state behind every finding. In a demand- letter conversation, evidence beats opinion.
The honest shortcut
We built SiteComply to do exactly that pass — accessibility signals, consent posture, broken links, SEO basics — in a single $29 audit where every finding points to the exact page state we observed. White-label friendly, built for agency portfolios, and it never claims more than it verified.