What does it cost to make a city or county website meet WCAG 2.1 AA?

The price of WCAG 2.1 AA work for a city, county or special district comes down to six things: templates, PDFs, video, forms, vendor tools and whether to fix or rebuild. Here is what pushes each one up or down and what to count before you ask for a quote.

If you run the website for a city, county or special district, someone will soon ask you for a number. Accessibility budgets are often set months before an RFP goes out, and the person setting them rarely knows what moves the price. This guide walks through the six things that push the cost of WCAG 2.1 AA work up or down, so you can scope the job before you call anyone.

The deadlines set the budget calendar.

The Department of Justice rule adopted WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the standard for the websites and mobile apps of state and local governments. Under an interim final rule published on April 20, 2026, public entities with a total population of 50,000 or more now have until April 26, 2027. Smaller entities and special district governments have until April 26, 2028. The rule moved the dates back a year and left the standard as it was (University of Arizona Digital Accessibility).

Use the extra year to plan the work. The DOJ also notes that public bodies already have an ongoing duty to make their online services accessible, whatever the compliance dates (Dirigible Studio). Our post on the Title II website deadlines covers the timeline in more detail.

The six things that drive the cost.

1. Pages and templates

Most websites are built from a small set of templates: the home page, a department page, a news story, an event, a search results page. Fix the header, menu and footer once and every page that uses them gets better. That is cheap work for the size of the result.

The price goes up when pages were built by hand over the years, with tables pasted in for layout, images with no text description and headings picked for their size. Each of those pages has to be checked and fixed on its own. The count of one-off pages matters more to the price than the total page count.

2. PDFs still in use

The rule covers what is on your site, including text, documents, PDFs, photos and videos (SBA Office of Advocacy). There is an exception for older documents. A PDF, Word file, spreadsheet or slide deck that was on the site before your compliance date can qualify, but not if it is currently used to apply for or access a service, and not if it is posted or edited after that date (WebYes).

So the old meeting minutes can often stay as they are. The permit application, the fee schedule and next week's agenda cannot. The cost depends on how many documents are in active use and how many new ones your staff post each month. Many of them are cheaper to turn into a normal web page than to repair as a PDF.

3. Video and live meetings

Prerecorded video needs accurate, synchronized captions. Live video such as council meetings and public hearings needs real-time captions (Ai-Media). Count the hours in your video library and how many meetings you stream. Live captions are a running cost, so put them in the yearly operating budget as well as the project budget.

4. Forms and payment flows

Contact forms, service requests, permit applications, utility payments and recreation sign-ups all need labels a screen reader can announce, clear error messages and full keyboard use. Forms you built yourself are usually quick to fix. Long multi-step flows with time limits and file uploads take more testing.

5. Vendor tools you do not control

Agenda software, payment portals, GIS maps, job boards and booking systems often sit on another company's servers. Content posted by a third party is only exempt if that third party is not posting under a contract, license or other arrangement with you (DocAccessible). If you pay for the tool, its accessibility is your problem.

You cannot fix a vendor's code. The cost here is testing their tools, asking for conformance reports, writing accessibility into renewals and sometimes switching vendors. Our guide to a county website RFP for ADA Title II has contract wording to ask for.

6. Fixing the current site or rebuilding it

If the site runs on an old content system, a theme full of hard-coded problems and a stack of plugins, fixing it can cost more than replacing it. A rebuild on accessible templates means every new page starts out right, and staff cannot easily break it. If the site is fairly recent and built on clean templates, fixing it is usually the cheaper path. An audit should tell you which side of that line you are on. If it points to a new site, our website rebuild page explains how we do it.

What pushes your price up or down.

The table below pulls the six drivers together. It has no dollar figures on purpose: the deadlines and exceptions behind it are sourced above, and your price depends on your own counts. Use it to fill in the facts any provider will ask for.

Audit alone, or audit plus fixes plus monthly checks.

There are three ways to buy this work, and they cost different amounts for good reasons.

• Audit only. You get a list of every failure against WCAG 2.1 AA. It costs the least up front, but someone still has to do the fixes, and that time often comes from staff who already have full jobs.
• Audit plus fixes. The same team finds the problems, fixes them and retests. You pay more at the start and avoid the gap between a report and a working site.
• Audit, fixes and monthly checks. Your site changes every week. New agendas, news posts and forms go up, and each one can bring a new failure. Documents posted after your compliance date do not get the older document exception, so monthly checks catch problems before residents do.

Nobody can promise you will never receive a complaint. What you can do is show steady, documented work against a clear standard.

How to get a number you can put in a budget.

Before you contact anyone, gather five counts:

• Your templates and roughly how many one-off pages sit outside them
• The PDFs in active use and how many new ones go up each month
• Hours of video and how many meetings you stream
• Your forms and payment flows
• Every vendor tool, with its contract renewal date

With those in hand, any provider can price the work against your real site instead of a guess.

Our ADA website compliance program lists fixed prices for audits, fixes, new accessible sites and monthly checks, with the Title II deadlines alongside. If you want a quick read first, the free Website Health Check shows how outdated and exposed your current site is. When you are ready to talk it through, book a call.