How Many ADA Website Lawsuits Get Filed, and Who Actually Gets Sued

The scariest sales pitch in my industry runs on a number nobody sources. You will see “thousands of businesses sued every year” on a hundred vendor websites, always in bold, never with a citation, usually sitting right above a buy button.

The number is real. The sourcing is worth doing properly, because if I am going to tell you something is a risk, you should be able to check my work.

I am not a lawyer. This is what the published filing data shows, and what the technical failures behind these complaints look like. It is not legal advice about your situation.

The actual count, and who counts it

There is no government agency publishing a tally of website accessibility lawsuits. The best count available comes from Seyfarth Shaw, a law firm that reviews federal court filings by hand each year and has published the figure since 2017.

Their count for 2025 is 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits filed in federal court, up roughly 27 percent from 2,452 in 2024. The run of years looks like this:

• 2017: 814
• 2018: 2,258
• 2019: 2,256
• 2020: 2,523
• 2021: 2,895
• 2022: 3,255
• 2023: 2,794
• 2024: 2,452
• 2025: 3,117

Two honest caveats, because a number without its limits is just a scare tactic. Seyfarth is a defense-side firm, meaning they represent businesses being sued rather than serving as a neutral statistical body. I use their figure because they do the counting and show their method, not because they are disinterested.

And this is federal filings only. You will see much larger totals quoted elsewhere, often 5,000 or more, by layering state court estimates on top. I have not been able to trace those combined figures to a primary source, so I am not going to repeat them at you. The federal number is solid. The bigger ones are estimates wearing a suit.

The number that does not get counted at all

Here is what the filing data structurally cannot show you. Most of these matters never become a lawsuit. They start and end as a demand letter, a few pages asserting your site is inaccessible and proposing a settlement well below what defending a case would cost.

Nobody files those with a court, so nobody counts them. There is no public dataset of demand letters at all, which means the true number of businesses contacted each year is unknown and necessarily larger than the filing count. It is also the form a small business is most likely to meet first, because a letter costs the sender almost nothing to send and a lawsuit does not.

Who gets sued

The intuition most owners have, that this is a big-company problem, is backwards. Filings weigh heavily toward small and mid-size businesses, and the reason is unglamorous: a large company has usually already been through this and fixed it, while a small one often has an old template site nobody has audited.

There is no small-business exemption in the ADA. There is no employee-count threshold, no revenue floor and no local-business carve-out. A twelve-person operation in Nampa is as covered as a national chain.

One genuine legal uncertainty is worth knowing about, and it cuts the other way. Federal appeals courts have split on whether a website with no tie to a physical location counts as a place of public accommodation at all. Some circuits say a purely online business is covered; others require a connection to a brick-and-mortar location. The Supreme Court has repeatedly declined to settle it. Where you sit geographically genuinely affects the answer, which is exactly the kind of thing to ask an attorney rather than a web developer.

What the complaints actually say

This is the useful part, because the pattern across published complaints is remarkably consistent. The same small set of failures appears over and over, and none of them are exotic. They are the defaults of a site built without anyone thinking about accessibility.

• Images with no alt text, so a screen reader announces “image” or reads out a filename
• Form fields with no labels, leaving a blind user with a box and no idea what belongs in it
• Low contrast text, particularly light gray on white, which fails at a measurable ratio rather than as a matter of taste
• Keyboard traps, where you can tab into a menu or modal and cannot get back out
• No visible focus indicator, so a keyboard user cannot see where they are on the page
• Inaccessible dropdown menus and popups, which is why the checkout and the newsletter modal come up so often
• Video without captions

Every one of those is fixable in the code, and most of them are cheap to fix compared to what a settlement costs. You can check for several of them yourself this afternoon with this checklist, no tools required.

Why the widget does not save you here

The overlay vendors market directly against this fear, and it is the reason many small businesses buy one. The trouble is that pasting in a script does not change the underlying markup a screen reader reads, which means the failures listed above are frequently still there afterward.

The Federal Trade Commission took action on exactly this point in January 2025, requiring accessiBe to pay $1 million over allegations it misrepresented its product’s ability to make sites WCAG compliant. I go through the whole question, fairly, in why overlay widgets don’t make your site compliant.

If a letter arrives

Talk to an attorney before you reply to anyone, including me. Do not call the number on the letter and start negotiating, and do not ignore it either. This is the one part of this article where getting it wrong is expensive.

Do not quietly delete the page they named, either. Preserving what the site looked like matters, and your attorney will want it.

What I can do, in parallel, is tell you truthfully how bad the technical situation is: what a real audit finds, which issues are genuinely blocking, and what remediation involves. That can go either way. A site can be in better shape than the letter implies, or worse. Either way you want the measurement before the conversation, not after.

The better reason to do this

I would rather you fix your site because roughly one in four American adults lives with a disability and some of them are trying to give you money right now. The legal exposure is real and I am not going to pretend otherwise, but fear makes people buy widgets, and widgets are how most of the wasted money in this field gets spent.

The background on what the law does and does not require is in ADA website compliance, what it actually means. The service itself, including what an audit covers, is on the ADA compliance page, or book a free 30-minute call and I will give you a straight read on where you stand.