The ADA Tax Credit for Website Accessibility: The Real Form 8826 Math

If your business had gross receipts of $1 million or less last year — or 30 or fewer full-time employees — the IRS will effectively pay for half of your website accessibility work, up to $5,000 per tax year. That’s the Disabled Access Credit under Section 44 of the tax code, claimed on IRS Form 8826: 50% of eligible access expenditures over $250, on spending up to $10,250 a year.

Overlay vendors have discovered this credit and now use it to discount widget subscriptions in their sales pitches. What their posts skip is the actual line-by-line math — and the awkward question of whether a widget receipt qualifies at all. Here’s both.

What the Disabled Access Credit actually is

The Disabled Access Credit is a federal tax credit — not a deduction — for small businesses that spend money complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act. A credit reduces your tax bill dollar for dollar, which makes it far more valuable than a deduction of the same size.

According to the Form 8826 instructions, eligible access expenditures are “amounts paid or incurred by the eligible small business to comply with applicable requirements” of the ADA, and they include money spent to remove barriers that prevent a business from being accessible to people with disabilities, and to make visual and audio materials available to people with visual or hearing impairments.

The Department of Justice’s ADA tax incentives page summarizes the same thing: the credit covers 50% of eligible expenditures in a year up to $10,250, for a maximum credit of $5,000. The same page notes a separate Section 190 deduction of up to $15,000 per year for barrier removal — but that one targets physical alterations, not code.

Who qualifies for the ADA tax credit?

You qualify if you pass either one of two tests for the preceding tax year, per the Form 8826 instructions:

• Gross receipts of $1 million or less, reduced by returns and allowances; or
• No more than 30 full-time employees, where full-time means at least 30 hours per week for 20 or more calendar weeks.

It’s an or, not an and. A 45-person agency with $900,000 in receipts qualifies on the revenue test. A $3 million restaurant group with 28 full-timers and a fleet of part-time staff qualifies on the headcount test. Related businesses under common control are counted together, so you can’t split one company into pieces to sneak under the line.

You elect the credit simply by filing Form 8826 with your return. It flows into the general business credit on Form 3800.

Does website accessibility work count?

By the form’s own categories, yes — though neither Form 8826 nor its instructions mention websites by name. The form predates the modern wave of digital-accessibility enforcement, and its ADA reference is the law “as in effect on November 5, 1990.” But the expenditure categories map cleanly onto web remediation: removing barriers that keep the business from being usable by people with disabilities, and making visual materials available to people with visual impairments is a fair description of fixing the markup a screen reader depends on.

The DOJ has long taken the position that Title III of the ADA applies to websites, which is what makes remediation an ADA-compliance expense rather than a nice-to-have. An audit plus code-level remediation against WCAG 2.1 AA sits squarely inside those categories — it’s barrier removal, applied to code. The one hard rule in the instructions worth underlining: expenditures must be “reasonable and necessary” to accomplish those accessibility purposes. Keep that phrase in mind — it does real work two sections from now.

One planning note: the instructions exclude barrier removal costs connected to a facility first placed in service after November 5, 1990 — a rule written for buildings. How that concept translates to a brand-new website build versus fixing an existing one is exactly the kind of question to put to your CPA rather than to a blog post.

The Form 8826 math, worked against a real invoice

Here is the form’s actual calculation, line by line, run against two realistic scenarios: a small e-commerce site buying an accessibility audit plus full remediation, and a brochure site buying a smaller scoped fix. (What drives those invoice sizes — templates, interactive components, current state — is covered in our ADA compliance cost breakdown.)

So the $11,500 project effectively costs $6,500 after the credit, and the $4,800 project costs $2,525. Two wrinkles the vendor posts gloss over:

The first $250 never counts. The credit is 50% of spending above $250, which is why a tiny invoice returns less than half.

The cap is on spending, not on projects. Anything you spend past $10,250 in one tax year earns nothing extra that year. If your remediation is large, paying for the audit in December and the remediation in January can legitimately put the spending in two tax years — and the credit is available in each. Timing like this is a conversation for your CPA, not a DIY move.

One more rule from the instructions: no double-dipping. To the extent of the credit, the same dollars can’t also be claimed as a deduction or capitalized. Your accountant handles this on the return, but it’s why “credit plus deduction on the same invoice” pitches are wrong.

Do overlay widget subscriptions qualify?

On shaky ground at best — and it’s the honest question missing from most of what ranks for this keyword, because most of what ranks is written by overlay vendors. accessiBe’s own tax-credit explainer, for instance, works the math on its $1,490 accessWidget subscription as a qualifying expense.

Here’s the problem. The statute requires expenditures to be reasonable and necessary to comply with the ADA. In January 2025, the Federal Trade Commission ordered accessiBe to pay $1 million to settle charges that it falsely claimed its widget could make any website WCAG compliant, and barred it from repeating the claim — an order the Commission finalized in April 2025.

That puts a widget buyer in a strange spot: claiming a federal tax credit for ADA compliance on a product whose compliance claims a federal regulator has formally called deceptive. We can’t tell you how the IRS would rule on a specific return — we’ve found no public IRS guidance that addresses overlays — but “reasonable and necessary” is the standard, and businesses running overlays keep getting sued anyway, which undercuts the “necessary to comply” half of the test. If you claim it, do so with your CPA’s sign-off and eyes open.

Remediation invoices don’t carry that baggage. Fixing the actual code is the thing the ADA compliance obligation points at, which is why it’s the cleaner claim — and the only one of the two that also removes the barriers.

How to claim the credit: five steps

1. Confirm eligibility for the preceding tax year — gross receipts of $1 million or less, or 30 or fewer full-time employees. One test is enough.
2. Keep the paper. Invoices, statements of work, and the audit report showing the spending was for ADA/WCAG remediation. The IRS estimates nearly 2 hours of recordkeeping for this form; that’s your documentation trail.
3. Complete Form 8826 — the eight-line calculation shown in the table above, capped at $5,000.
4. Carry it to Form 3800 (Part III, line 1e) as part of the general business credit. Per the Form 3800 instructions, unused general business credits generally carry back 1 year and forward 20 — so a low-profit year doesn’t waste the credit.
5. File it with your return, through your CPA. Partnerships and S corporations pass the credit through on Schedule K.

What this means for your remediation budget

Run the numbers before you decide accessibility is unaffordable. A qualifying small business looking at a five-figure remediation quote is really looking at roughly half that, net of the credit — this year’s work up to $10,250 costs you about 50 cents on the dollar, and a multi-year program can capture the credit more than once. That materially changes the comparison in our small-business compliance guide: the “expensive” real fix, after the credit, often lands closer to the overlay subscription that fixes nothing.

The sequence that makes the credit work is the same one that makes the site work: scope the problem, then pay for manual remediation you can document. Start with the scoping — run a free accessibility scan and we’ll follow it with a fixed-scope quote you can hand straight to your CPA.