Data

ADA lawsuit statistics from federal court records

4,540 ADA accommodations lawsuits were filed in US federal courts in the twelve months through August 2026, out of 96,321 in the full federal record we track. The numbers below come directly from court dockets, not from a vendor's marketing survey, as the record stood in October 2026.

How many are website accessibility lawsuits?

The court code behind these numbers covers every ADA accommodations suit, websites and physical premises together, so no docket count separates ADA website lawsuits on its own. Website cases are a large and growing share: industry trackers that read the complaints count around 4,000 website accessibility lawsuits a year once New York and California state courts are included, plus demand letters that are never filed anywhere. The federal series below is the part of the trend anyone can check against public dockets; its limits are listed at the end of this page.

Filings by month

Year to date, January through August: 2,958 filings in 2026 against 3,707 in the same months of 2025, a change of -20.2%.

Where the lawsuits are filed

The twelve months through August 2026, by district:

Florida, California, and New York districts consistently lead. If your business is reachable from those states, which for a website means always, that is where a complaint would most likely be filed. Why the volume lands disproportionately on small businesses is a question with a concrete answer: the economics of the target pool.

Which business types get sued

Distinct named defendants in the twelve months through August 2026, grouped by what the business name itself reveals. These are floors, not totals: a restaurant called "Rossi Group LLC" matches no keyword, so every row undercounts. Two of these have their own guide: restaurants and hotels.

Where these numbers come from, and what they do not include

• Source: US federal court dockets via CourtListener (Free Law Project), nature-of-suit code 446, "Americans with Disabilities - Other". We collected this dataset for our own audit work. The figures reflect the record as of October 2026 and are no longer refreshed.
• NOS 446 covers all ADA accommodations suits, digital and physical. Website and app cases are a large and growing subset, but this table does not separate them; industry trackers estimate around 4,000 web-specific cases a year once state courts are included.
• Federal courts only. New York and California state-court filings (including California Unruh Act cases) are not in these counts, so total accessibility litigation runs meaningfully higher than this table. How the Unruh Act works is in our guide to ADA website compliance in California.
• Accommodations cases only. ADA employment discrimination suits (NOS 445) and education cases (NOS 448) are separate codes and not counted here.
• Demand letters are invisible to every docket. Most accessibility disputes start, and many end, as pre-suit demand letters that are never filed anywhere. Industry estimates put demand letters at several times the lawsuit count, so no court-record statistic, ours included, measures the full volume of claims.
• The most recent two months are excluded because court data arrives with a lag; a month is shown only once its record is reasonably complete.

If you are reading this because you were sued

Statistics do not resolve a complaint. What your defense attorney will want is an independent assessment of what is actually broken on your site: start with the first 72 hours guide, and see the published settlement ranges for what these cases cost.