Plaintiffs filed 1,037 ADA website lawsuits in the first quarter of 2026 — a 5.49% increase over Q1 2025 (EcomBack Q1 2026 report). The bigger story is where and who: Illinois has overtaken New York as the busiest state, Shopify-built stores absorbed 44% of all filings, and about one in four sued websites had an accessibility widget installed when the complaint landed. Here’s the mid-year picture, number by number, with sources you can check.
How many ADA website lawsuits so far in 2026?
Two organizations count these cases, and both show the same direction. EcomBack, which reviews individual complaints, logged 1,037 lawsuits in Q1 2026, up from 983 in Q1 2025. UsableNet’s lawsuit tracker — which casts a wider net across federal and key state courts — recorded 441 more cases in May 2026 alone, with its full mid-year report still to come.
For context, EcomBack’s 2025 annual report counted 3,948 website lawsuits for all of last year, a 23.84% jump over 2024. So 2026’s pace isn’t an explosion — it’s consolidation at a high level. The wave that we broke down in last year’s numbers post didn’t recede; it became the baseline.
One honest caveat: the trackers use different methods. EcomBack reads each complaint and classifies it; UsableNet’s totals run higher because it counts more venues. Neither is wrong. Every figure below says which count it comes from.
Which states lead in 2026 — and why did the map flip?
Illinois is the new number one, and the reshuffle is dramatic. Here’s the Q1 2026 state picture from EcomBack, against the same quarter last year:
| State | Q1 2026 filings | Share | Q1 2025 filings | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Illinois | 256 | 24.69% | 111 | More than doubled |
| California | 194 | 18.71% | 144 | Up |
| Florida | 186 | 17.94% | 226 | Down, but still heavy |
| New York | 160 | 15.43% | 369 | Collapsed to less than half |
Two shifts matter for owners. First, Illinois went from a mid-tier venue to the national leader in a single year — a reminder that a couple of active plaintiff’s firms can redraw the map fast. Second, New York, which led the country with 1,108 filings in 2025 per EcomBack’s annual report, fell to fourth. Florida now files more website cases than New York, even after cooling from its own 2025 peak of 950.
The practical takeaway isn’t “move your business.” Plaintiffs sue where their lawyers file, not where you’re located — an online store in Ohio can be sued in an Illinois or Florida court. Geography tells you the weather, not whether your roof leaks.
Why are Shopify stores taking 44% of the hits?
Shopify-built websites appeared in 459 of Q1 2026’s lawsuits — 44.26% of every case filed, up sharply from 325 cases (33.06%) in Q1 2025 (EcomBack). Custom-coded sites drew 324 complaints (31.24%), WordPress 150 (14.46%), with Squarespace, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and BigCommerce splitting most of the rest.
That doesn’t mean Shopify is uniquely broken. It means Shopify is where small e-commerce lives, and small e-commerce is what serial plaintiffs target: product grids with missing alt text, theme carousels that trap keyboards, checkout forms with unlabeled fields, and third-party apps that inject inaccessible pop-ups. A tester can document those barriers in minutes, and the store owner usually has no idea they exist.
If that’s your stack, our guide to Shopify ADA compliance walks through the theme- and app-level fixes. The industry data points the same direction: restaurants and food businesses drew 334 lawsuits (32.21%) in Q1 2026 — the most-hit sector, ahead of fashion and apparel at 261 (25.17%) (EcomBack). Online menus, reservation widgets, and ordering flows are dense with exactly the barriers testers look for; we cover the pattern on our restaurant accessibility page.
Do widgets stop lawsuits? The 2026 answer is still no
In Q1 2026, 265 of the 1,037 sued websites — 25.55% — had an accessibility widget or overlay installed, up from 209 cases a year earlier (EcomBack). The monthly counts were steady: 91 widget-equipped defendants in January, 87 in February, 87 in March. UsableNet’s tracker shows the pattern holding past the quarter, with 121 of May 2026’s 441 defendants running a third-party widget when they were sued.
That share has been remarkably stable — EcomBack’s 2025 annual report put it at 983 lawsuits (24.90%) for last year, with accessiBe alone appearing in 424 of those widget cases. Roughly a quarter of defendants, every quarter, paid for a tool that promised to prevent exactly this.
The reason is mechanical, not mysterious: an overlay is JavaScript layered over broken markup, and the plaintiff’s tester experiences the markup. We’ve laid out the full evidence on whether overlays work, including the FTC’s $1 million order against accessiBe. Nothing in the 2026 data changes that conclusion.
Who’s actually filing these cases?
A very small group. EcomBack found that the top 27 plaintiffs filed 524 of Q1 2026’s 1,037 lawsuits — 50.53% of everything filed — with the most active single plaintiff, Julie Dalton, bringing 67 cases in three months. Concentration on the lawyer side is even tighter: the top 10 law firms filed 856 lawsuits, or 82.55% of the quarter.
This is the defining feature of ADA website litigation: it’s an industry run by repeat players, which is why the same complaint template shows up against hundreds of unrelated businesses. Our profile of serial ADA plaintiffs explains how the model works and why “we never heard from the customer” is no defense. UsableNet’s year-end analysis adds a sobering detail: 1,427 of 2025’s digital accessibility lawsuits targeted companies that had already been sued at least once (UsableNet) — settling without fixing the site just re-lists you as a proven payer.
What changed in the law this spring?
Two real developments, both from April 2026 — one that helps some businesses, one that’s widely misread.
Missouri passed the country’s most aggressive anti-abusive-litigation law. SB 907, the Act Against Abusive Website or Web Content Access Litigation, cleared the General Assembly unanimously on April 21, 2026 and takes effect August 28, 2026 (Ecommerce Innovation Alliance). It gives defendants who take substantial good-faith steps to fix a reported barrier within 90 days a rebuttable presumption that a later claim is abusive, and lets courts award fee-shifting plus sanctions of up to three times fees against abusive filers (Converge Accessibility). It protects good-faith fixers — it does nothing for businesses that ignore the problem.
The DOJ extended the Title II web deadlines — for governments, not you. An interim final rule effective April 20, 2026 pushed the compliance dates for state and local government websites back a year, to April 2027 for larger entities and April 2028 for smaller ones (Federal Register). Private businesses are covered by Title III, which has no compliance date to extend — the obligation is already in force, as every filing statistic above demonstrates.
What should a small business do with these numbers?
The mid-year data points to a short, unglamorous playbook:
- Find your barriers before a tester does. Run a free automated scan for the machine-detectable issues, then check the flows plaintiffs actually cite — menus, product pages, forms, checkout.
- Skip the widget. A quarter of Q1’s defendants had one. Put that subscription money toward fixing the code instead.
- Fix in the source, keep records. Manual remediation to WCAG 2.1 AA is what holds up — and under laws like Missouri’s SB 907, documented good-faith fixes are becoming a formal legal shield.
- Don’t relax after one settlement. With repeat defendants making up such a large share of filings, an unfixed site is an open invitation to the next plaintiff.
For the fuller strategy, see how to avoid an ADA lawsuit. None of this is legal advice — if a demand letter has already arrived, talk to an attorney first.
The 2026 numbers don’t show panic; they show a machine running smoothly: 1,037 filings in a quarter, half from 27 plaintiffs, aimed at small stores on mainstream platforms. The businesses that stay out of the dataset are the ones whose sites simply work. Want to know which group you’re in? Start with a free scan.