For city, county and school-district web teams: WCAG 2.1 AA applies from April 26, 2027 (population 50,000+) or April 26, 2028. Type your page counts and see which documents the 35.201 exceptions take off the bill — in the example, $460,246.67 of a $478,062.67 fix-everything budget.
Who: cities, counties, school districts and special districts under ADA Title II. WCAG 2.1 AA applies to your web content from April 26, 2027 if your population is 50,000 or more, from April 26, 2028 if smaller or a special district (28 CFR 35.200).
At stake: a scanner flags every failing PDF. The rule exempts archived content, older documents nobody uses for a service and individual documents behind a login (28 CFR 35.201). Example: 1,200 of 32,200 pages must be fixed — $17,816.00 instead of $478,062.67. Miss the forms people still use and they fail the rule on day one.
Check here: type your population and the page counts from your media library.
| WCAG 2.1 AA required from April 26 of | 2027 |
| Pages you must fix before that date (35.201(b) does not exempt them) | 1,200 |
| Pages exempt under 35.201(a), (b) and (d) | 31,000 |
| Pages in your document inventory | 32,200 |
| Share of your inventory the rule does not require you to fix | 96.27% |
| Hours to fix the pages you must fix | 400 |
| Cost to fix the pages you must fix | $17,816.00 |
| Cost if you fix every page in the inventory | $478,062.67 |
| Budget the exceptions take off the bill | $460,246.67 |
| Weeks of one full-time person (40 h) before the date | 10 |
| Hours per year to post new documents accessibly from that date | 1,000 |
| Cost per year for new documents from that date | $44,540.00 |
Full version — $21 once: the .xlsx with these 12 live formulas plus a dated Document Register that marks each PDF Must fix or Exempt under 28 CFR 35.201 (a) to (e).
Everything updates as you type. Nothing is uploaded. This runs in your browser.
Sources: 28 CFR 35.200 (dates April 26, 2027 / April 26, 2028), 35.201 (exceptions a–e), 35.104 (definitions of archived web content, conventional electronic documents, special district government, total population), read on Cornell LII on October 1, 2026 · BLS OEWS 2025, web developers (SOC 15-1254), median $44.54 an hour. The exceptions lift the WCAG 2.1 AA rule only; other Title II duties such as effective communication on request (28 CFR 35.160) still apply. A scoping tool, not legal advice.