Data

ADA lawsuit statistics from federal court records

4,557 ADA accommodations lawsuits were filed in US federal courts in the twelve months through July 2026, out of 95,992 in the full federal record we track. The numbers below come directly from court dockets, not from a vendor's marketing survey, and this page is refreshed monthly.

Filings by month

Year to date, January through July: 2,605 filings in 2026 against 3,337 in the same months of 2025, a change of -21.9%.

Where the lawsuits are filed

The twelve months through July 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 July 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 maintain this dataset daily for our own audit work and publish the aggregates here monthly.
• 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.
• 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.