ADA website lawsuit trends: what 2025’s numbers mean for 2026

Published July 2026.

The EAA is a European story, but the US side of web accessibility risk never went away — it's climbing again. After two years of decline, federal website accessibility lawsuit filings jumped back up in 2025, and the numbers are the clearest signal yet that "we'll deal with it later" is getting more expensive every year it's deferred.

The number

Plaintiffs filed 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits in federal court in 2025 — a 27% increase over 2024's 2,452, according to Seyfarth Shaw's ADA Title III tracker, the most consistently cited legal-industry source for this data. That increase essentially erases the declines seen in 2023 and 2024, putting filings back on the upward trend that's held since digital accessibility litigation started in earnest. (Other trackers that include additional state courts beyond the federal count report higher totals — the federal number is the one with the longest, most consistent methodology, which is why it's the one worth anchoring to year over year.)

Two things worth noting in the same data: website accessibility cases now make up roughly a third of all federal ADA Title III filings, and a meaningful share of 2025's lawsuits targeted companies that had already faced a prior web accessibility claim — getting sued once doesn't mean the risk is closed out.

Independent corroboration: UsableNet's own 2025 tracker — which counts federal and state courts separately rather than blending them — puts 2025 federal filings at 3,195, within a few dozen cases of Seyfarth's number despite different methodologies. Add UsableNet's state-court count (mostly New York and California) and the nationwide total climbs past 5,000, but that's a different, broader measurement than the federal year-over-year comparison above — worth knowing, not worth conflating.

What this means for a web agency

None of this is really about lawsuit odds for any one client — it's about what happens when a client asks "are we exposed?" and the honest answer is "nobody checked." The pattern that actually reduces risk isn't a compliance certificate (nobody can issue one honestly); it's a defensible paper trail: what was scanned, what was found, what got fixed, and what's still open.

That's the same workflow this blog's EAA post covers for the European side — scan, prioritize, fix, verify, document — and it doesn't change based on which side of the Atlantic the client's exposure is coming from.

The one thing not to do

Don't use a rising lawsuit count to sell fear of a guaranteed outcome — most sites with accessibility issues are never sued, and overclaiming risk is just as dishonest as overclaiming compliance. The honest pitch is narrower and more useful: the cost of finding and fixing issues before someone else finds them for you is generally lower than the cost of responding to a demand letter with nothing to show for the time since the last time anyone looked.

See how Gangway's remediation workflow works or start a 14-day trial.