ADA Title II and your website: where the rule actually stands

What the rule requires

In April 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice published a final rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act setting a specific technical standard for the websites and mobile apps of state and local governments. Before that rule, the ADA clearly applied to your website, but no regulation said precisely what "accessible" meant. Now one does.

The standard is WCAG 2.1, Level AA — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.1, at the middle of three conformance levels. In practice it covers things like: every image having a meaningful text alternative, every function being usable with a keyboard alone, text having sufficient contrast against its background, forms having properly associated labels, and video having captions.

This applies to essentially everything your municipality publishes online: your website, your mobile app if you have one, and the documents you post — including your agendas, your minutes, your budget, and your bylaws.

The deadlines moved. Here are the real ones.

On April 20, 2026, the Department of Justice published an interim final rule extending both compliance dates by one year. This is the single most important fact on this page, because it means a large share of the guidance published between 2024 and early 2026 — including pages that still rank well in search — now states the wrong deadline.

Most municipalities reading this are in the second row. If your town has fewer than 50,000 residents, you have until April 26, 2028.

"Population" does not mean what most people assume

This trips people up, and getting it wrong can put you on the wrong side of a deadline by a full year.

Your population, for the purposes of this rule, is your 2020 decennial Census population. The Department of Justice is explicit that it is not the number of people your entity serves, and not the number of people it employs.

A few consequences worth knowing:

• A department or agency within a city — your police department, your library, your parks department — takes the population of the city it belongs to. A police department serving a town of 4,000 is a "under 50,000" entity, not a tiny one of its own.
• Independent school districts are measured using the 2022 Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates rather than the Census.
• Special districts have no Census population at all — so they land in the later group by definition. Water districts, fire districts, transit authorities, sewer and utility districts: your deadline is April 26, 2028, regardless of how large or small you are.

A regional authority that serves 200,000 people but is legally a special district is on the 2028 date. A city of 51,000 is on the 2027 date. It is the legal form and the Census number that decide, not the size of the service area.

What you do not have to fix

The rule is more forgiving than the panic around it suggests. There are five exceptions, and for a typical municipality they matter a great deal — particularly the second one.

1. Archived web content. Content kept only for reference, that isn't changed after being archived, and is clearly identified as archived.
2. Pre-existing electronic documents. Documents you posted before your compliance date do not have to be retroactively remediated — unless they are still being used to apply for, access, or participate in a service, program or activity.
3. Content posted by third parties that isn't under your control.
4. Individualized, password-protected documents — a specific resident's utility bill, for example.
5. Pre-existing social media posts.

Read exception 2 carefully, because it is the one that decides your budget. It does not mean "you can ignore all your old PDFs." A zoning application form from 2019 that residents still download and submit is not a historical artifact — it is a live part of a public program, and it needs to be accessible. A set of council minutes from 2019 that nobody transacts with is a different matter.

The practical question is therefore not "how many PDFs do we have?" but "how many of our PDFs are still load-bearing?" That number is usually far smaller, and it is the number worth counting before anyone quotes you for remediation. We go through that arithmetic in what it actually costs to fix an inaccessible website.

Is the rule going to change again?

This is the question we get asked most, usually in a slightly lowered voice, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a sales answer.

It might. When the Department of Justice extended the deadlines, it did not simply move the dates and stop talking. It also signalled that it intends to look again at the substance of the rule, and it raised a genuine legal question about whether incorporating a standard like WCAG — which is maintained by an outside body and can change — is compatible with the notice-and-comment requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act. A comment period on the extension closed on June 22, 2026. Disability advocacy organisations have mobilised against any weakening.

So: an honest reading is that the deadline has already slipped once and could slip again, and that the substantive requirements could be revisited. Anyone who tells you the April 2028 date is carved in stone is overstating it.

And yet we would still not advise waiting, for three reasons that have nothing to do with wanting to sell you anything.

1. The ADA applied to your website before this rule existed

The 2024 rule set a standard. It did not create the underlying obligation. Title II has required state and local governments not to discriminate on the basis of disability since 1990, and courts and the DOJ have applied that to websites for years. If the rule were repealed tomorrow, an inaccessible municipal website would still be a legal exposure — you would simply have lost the clarity of knowing exactly what "accessible" means. A rollback makes your position more uncertain, not safer.

2. WCAG 2.1 AA is already in your procurement documents

This is the part most people miss. Go and read a handful of municipal website RFPs published this year. You will find WCAG 2.1 Level AA specified as a requirement in a great many of them — often in the exact phrasing "WCAG 2.1 AA at minimum, or the most current standard at the time of implementation." That requirement did not come from the DOJ. It came from procurement officers, state guidance, and peer municipalities, and it is now simply what a professional municipal website is expected to be.

Which means the standard survives the regulation. Whatever happens in Washington, the next website you buy will be specified as WCAG 2.1 AA, because that is what the market now asks for.

3. The work does not compress

Whatever your deadline is, the work of making a municipal website accessible — auditing it, fixing it, retraining the people who publish to it — takes months, not weeks. A one-year extension is not a year of doing nothing; it is a year of not having to do it in a panic. Towns that treat it as breathing room tend to land well. Towns that treat it as a reprieve tend to be the ones getting an emergency quote in early 2028.

Where to start, if you are starting today

1. Establish which date is actually yours. Look up your 2020 Census population. If you are a special district, you are on 2028 and you can stop worrying about which side of 50,000 you fall on.
2. Run an automated scan, and then distrust it. Free automated tools will find real problems and will make you feel more informed than you are. They typically catch only a minority of WCAG issues — the machine-detectable ones. A clean automated report is not a compliant website.
3. Count your load-bearing documents. Not every PDF you have ever posted. The ones people still use to apply for something, pay something, or participate in something. That is your real remediation scope.
4. Check whether your site can even get there. This is the uncomfortable one. Some content management systems generate markup that cannot be made conformant no matter what your staff do, because the templates themselves are the problem. If the platform is the barrier, remediation is money spent renting a problem.
5. Decide honestly between fixing and replacing. For a lot of small municipalities the arithmetic lands somewhere counterintuitive: a full remediation quote comes in higher than a new, accessible site. That is not a rhetorical flourish — it is what the published rate cards imply, and we show the arithmetic.

The honest scale of the problem

If it is any comfort: almost nobody is compliant yet. WebAIM's annual analysis of the top million home pages found WCAG failures on 95.9% of them, with government home pages averaging roughly 36 detectable errors each — and those are only the errors a machine can see.

You are not behind your peers. You are on schedule with an entire sector that is, collectively, behind. The towns that will be fine in 2028 are simply the ones that start while the deadline is still far enough away to be boring.

This page is maintained. If the rule changes again, we update it here and change the "last reviewed" date above. It is a guide, not legal advice — for a determination about your municipality's obligations, talk to your attorney.