No — geo-blocking California does not make ADA lawsuit risk go away. You can block California IP addresses, and no law stops you. But the federal ADA still covers your website in the other 49 states, a $5 VPN walks straight through the block, New York’s laws set the same trap with bigger numbers, and you’d be walling off the largest state economy in the country to dodge a risk that follows you anyway.
If you’re reading this, you probably got the letter: a demand citing California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, a list of WCAG failures, and a settlement number. Somewhere in a forum, someone suggested just blocking California. Here’s what that actually buys you — and what it costs.
Why owners think about blocking California
The instinct makes sense once you see the math. The Unruh Act carries a statutory minimum of $4,000 per violation, with up to three times actual damages, plus attorney’s fees — the exact language is in California Civil Code section 52. The federal ADA, by contrast, gives private plaintiffs injunctive relief and fees, not damages. California bolted a price tag onto the federal standard.
It gets worse: under Civil Code section 51(f), any violation of the federal ADA “shall also constitute a violation” of the Unruh Act. A plaintiff doesn’t have to prove some separate California wrong — the ADA claim converts directly into a damages claim. That combination is why California is one of the two epicenters of this litigation, and why we wrote a whole page on ADA website lawsuits in California.
So the fantasy is understandable: if Californians can’t reach the site, Californians can’t sue. The fantasy fails on three independent grounds.
Does blocking California actually end Unruh Act exposure?
Not the way owners imagine, because California jurisdiction turns on who you do business with, not which IP addresses you serve. The leading case is Thurston v. Fairfield Collectibles of Georgia (2020), where a blind Californian sued a Georgia company over its inaccessible website. The California Court of Appeal held the Georgia company could be sued in California because it made roughly 8 to 10 percent of its sales to Californians — about $320,000 to $375,000 a year — which made its website “the equivalent of having a brick-and-mortar store in California.”
Read that holding carefully. The court measured sales to California residents. An IP block that leaks — and they all leak, as we’ll get to — while you keep accepting orders shipped to Los Angeles doesn’t change the jurisdictional facts at all.
There’s an honest nuance here: the Thurston court itself noted that if Fairfield found California litigation too burdensome, “it can simply choose not to sell to Californians and to post a notice to that effect on its website.” A genuinely total withdrawal — no sales, no shipping, no marketing into California — is a stronger position than an IP curtain. But that’s not a firewall setting; that’s exiting a market. Which brings us to what the exit costs, and to the two problems it doesn’t solve.
The federal ADA doesn’t care about state lines
Blocking California does nothing about federal ADA liability, because Title III applies to your website from every state. The Department of Justice’s published guidance is blunt: “the ADA’s requirements apply to all the goods, services, privileges, or activities offered by public accommodations, including those offered on the web” (ADA.gov web guidance).
And the federal docket is not slowing down. Law firm Seyfarth Shaw counted 3,117 website accessibility lawsuits filed in federal court in 2025 — a 27% jump from 2024’s 2,452 (Seyfarth Shaw). Every one of those plaintiffs could still reach a site that geo-blocked California. A federal plaintiff can’t collect Unruh-style damages, but the injunction plus their attorney’s fees plus your defense costs is not a small bill — we break down what these cases actually cost in settlements and defense costs.
New York is the same trap with a bigger docket
Here’s the part the forum threads miss: even if California vanished from the map, New York filed more of these lawsuits in 2025 than any other state. Seyfarth found New York’s federal courts the busiest in the country with 1,021 website accessibility filings (Seyfarth), and UsableNet counted nearly 2,000 additional cases in New York and California state courts combined, out of more than 5,000 digital accessibility suits filed nationwide in 2025 (UsableNet).
New York’s State and City Human Rights Laws work a lot like Unruh: they’ve been interpreted to cover websites, they allow compensatory damages and civil penalties the federal ADA doesn’t, and “your business doesn’t have to be located in New York to be sued” under them (Level Access). So the block-one-state plan immediately becomes block-two-states. Then you notice UsableNet’s finding that filings are now rising in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Missouri (UsableNet). There is no finish line to this strategy — just a shrinking map of customers you’re still allowed to have.
VPNs make the wall a screen door
Even as a technical measure, IP-based geo-blocking is porous. Geolocation databases guess a visitor’s state from their IP address, and a VPN replaces that address entirely — 32% of Americans currently use a VPN, per Security.org’s June 2025 consumer survey. A Californian on a VPN, on a phone roaming through Nevada, on corporate network traffic that exits in another state, or simply visiting family in Phoenix sails past your block.
That matters legally, not just technically. The moment a California resident gets through and completes a purchase you ship to a California address, you are back to doing business with Californians — the exact fact pattern Thurston says creates jurisdiction. You’d have to refuse California billing and shipping addresses too, at which point you haven’t blocked a website; you’ve fired every customer in the state.
What the block costs you versus what it stops
Add it up, and geo-blocking is a bad trade even before the legal analysis:
| Question | Geo-blocking California |
|---|---|
| Stops federal ADA lawsuits? | No — Title III applies in all 50 states |
| Stops New York HRL claims? | No — same out-of-state reach, damages available |
| Ends Unruh exposure? | Only if you truly stop all California sales, not just IPs |
| Defeats VPNs and travelers? | No — 32% of Americans use a VPN |
| Erases a demand letter you already received? | No — the alleged violation already occurred |
| Commercial cost | Walling off a $4.1 trillion economy — the world’s 4th largest |
That last row deserves a number. California’s economy hit $4.1 trillion in GDP, larger than Japan’s (Office of the Governor, April 2025). The Georgia company in Thurston did 8 to 10 percent of its revenue there. And ecommerce sites are the main target of this litigation anyway: nearly 70% of all ADA web lawsuits in 2025 hit online stores (UsableNet). Giving up roughly a tenth of your revenue, forever, to partially mitigate one state’s version of a nationwide legal duty is the worst deal on the table.
What actually makes the risk go away
The only exit that works in every state at once is the boring one: make the site accessible. Not with a widget — overlay-equipped sites get sued constantly — but by fixing the code to WCAG 2.1 AA, the standard courts and the DOJ consistently point to. Here’s the sequence we recommend to owners holding a demand letter:
- Don’t ignore the letter, and don’t panic-pay. Get a qualified attorney’s read on the specific claim. Our demand letter guide covers the first 48 hours.
- Get a real audit. A code-level accessibility audit documents what a plaintiff’s tester would find — with a screen reader and keyboard, not just a scanner.
- Fix the barriers in the source. Manual remediation repairs the HTML, forms, focus order, and alt text. Fixed code is fixed for plaintiffs in Sacramento, Brooklyn, and Miami alike — and UsableNet found 1,427 of 2025’s suits targeted companies that had already been sued once, so half-fixes invite round two.
- Keep it fixed. New pages reintroduce old problems; monitoring catches them before a serial plaintiff does. It also happens to be why repeat lawsuits keep finding the same defendants.
Remediation is a one-time project with a known scope. Geo-blocking is a permanent revenue cut that leaves the legal risk standing. One of these is a business decision; the other is a hiding spot with a hole in it.
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