How much does an accessibility audit cost?

Both sides ask this: a business wondering whether the quote is fair, and an agency trying to price the work without losing money. The honest answer is that audits are priced on structure, not size, and that the biggest variable is what happens after the report.

Why the page count barely matters

An audit is priced on how many templates and flows you have, not how many URLs. A site with four hundred product pages usually has one product template, one listing template, a cart and a checkout: four things to test properly. A site with twelve pages can have twelve bespoke designs and take longer. The first question to ask a vendor is "how many templates and flows are you testing?", and if the answer is a page count, the quote is being guessed.

What actually drives the number

• Manual testing depth. A keyboard-only pass is hours. A screen reader pass on the flows that earn money is days. Both are worth far more than any automated report.
• Complexity of the flows. A contact form is an afternoon. A checkout with a payment provider, address validation, saved cards and error states is where the time goes.
• Remediation, and who does it. Fixing a page builder's output can be quick or can mean fighting the theme. This is why quotes for "fixing" everything up front are usually wrong, in one direction or the other.
• Documentation and handover. A report a developer can act on takes longer to write than a list of issues. It is also the part that gets you hired again.
• Ongoing monitoring. The part that turns a project into a retainer, and should be priced per site per month, not per page or per scan.

Honest ranges

These are the shapes you will see in the market, not a quote:

• Automated scan only: free to a few hundred, depending on how many sites and how the report is presented. This is what software can do, and nobody should pay consultancy prices for it.
• Small site audit, manual, a handful of templates: a few days of work. A freelancer with real assistive-technology skills typically charges a day rate for a day's work; anyone quoting a two-figure fee for a manual audit is not doing one.
• E-commerce or a transactional site: multiply by the number of flows, not pages. The checkout and account area are usually half the effort.
• Monitoring: a small monthly amount per site, covering rescanning, alerting and a refreshed report. Price it per site, and expect it to be the line item that survives.

What a good quote looks like

1. What will be tested: named templates, named flows, named methods (automated, keyboard, screen reader, contrast measurement).
2. What will not be tested, written down. If that section is missing, the vendor is planning to disappoint somebody.
3. How findings will be delivered: evidence, severity, effort, and a retest.
4. The price of remediation, separately, or an explicit statement that it is a separate engagement.
5. What happens after: monitoring, and how much it costs per site.

The sentence that should make you suspicious

"We will make your site fully compliant." Nobody can promise that, because conformance is not something a script or a one-off project can certify, and the vendors who have promised it have been fined for it. What a good vendor promises is specific: these problems were found, these were fixed, this was retested on this date, and here is what remains. That is a promise you can keep and a document a client can defend.

Doing the cheap part yourself

Roughly a third of what an audit finds can be found by reading the HTML, and that part costs nothing with our free checker or the free WordPress plugin. Run it first, fix what it finds, and you will either reduce the size of the audit you need — or discover that the quote you were given was for work you had already done.

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