Who is actually enforcing the European Accessibility Act in 2026?

EAA Comply · Published 27 July 2026 · 8 min read

The European Accessibility Act has been applicable since 28 June 2025. Thirteen months on, the internet is full of tables listing the maximum fine in each member state. Almost none of those tables tell you the thing you actually want to know, which is whether anyone has ever been made to pay one.

We went looking for the answer in English, Spanish, German, French and Italian. Here is what we found, including the parts that undercut our own sales pitch.

The headline finding: no publicly recorded EAA fine, anywhere

As far as any public record shows, no national market surveillance authority in any EU member state has publicly imposed a fine on a named company under the EAA. Not in Spain, not in Germany, not in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium or the Nordics.

Every country-by-country penalty figure in circulation — and there are a lot of them — is a statutory maximum written into a national transposition law. It describes what a regulator is permitted to do. It is not evidence of what any regulator has done. When a vendor writes "fines of up to €1,000,000 in Spain", the accurate reading is: Spain's sanctions regime tops out there, in the most serious cases, and nobody has been publicly sanctioned yet.

Why we are telling you this. We sell accessibility audits. It would be easier to imply the fines have started. But a compliance argument built on a fabrication collapses the first time your lawyer checks it, and the actual case for fixing your site does not need the exaggeration.

What is happening: the machinery is being built

Germany — a staffed, operational surveillance body

Germany established the MLBF (Marküberwachungsstelle der Länder für die Barrierefreiheit von Produkten und Dienstleistungen), the joint market surveillance body of the federal states for the accessibility of products and services, on 26 September 2025. It is based in Magdeburg and is reported to have roughly 70 staff. Its administrative council adopted its market surveillance strategies in late January 2026.

The MLBF can act on consumer complaints and on its own initiative, and checks both formal compliance — is there an accessibility declaration, is it accurate — and actual usability through manual testing. The statutory maximum penalty under the German BFSG is up to €100,000, with distribution bans available in extreme cases.

What we could not find, anywhere, is a single figure for how many complaints the MLBF has received, how many cases it has opened, or whether it has fined anyone. That silence is itself worth knowing.

Germany's other risk: competitor warning letters

There is a distinctly German exposure that has nothing to do with the regulator. Under German unfair-competition law, a competitor can send an Abmahnung — a formal warning letter, with costs — over a non-compliant site. Industry sources report these rose noticeably from late 2025 into the first quarter of 2026. This is a private-party mechanism, it moves much faster than any market surveillance procedure, and for a German-facing shop it is a more realistic near-term risk than a fine.

Spain — a coordination unit, in force since February 2026

Royal Decree 143/2026 of 25 February, published in the BOE on 27 February 2026 and in force the following day, created a technical support and coordination unit for the authorities that supervise accessibility requirements. It sits under the Directorate-General for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and implements Article 28 of Ley 11/2023, Spain's EAA transposition.

The unit itself imposes nothing. It provides technical support to the surveillance authorities, liaises with the EU, and acts as a contact point for citizens and economic operators. Notably, Article 3(f) tasks it with collecting information on infringements and sanctions — which implies an expectation that there will be some to collect.

France — a regulator that has started issuing formal notices

On 24 June 2026, Arcom formally put the Ministry of Public Action and Accounts on notice over impots.gouv.fr, citing non-compliance affecting essential functions — filing an income declaration, consulting a tax notice, secure messaging — and failure to display the site's accessibility level. Arcom announced it on 6 July 2026, and French press reported it as a first.

Two caveats that matter. This is the public sector, under the Web Accessibility Directive regime, not the EAA. And a mise en demeure is an order to comply, not a fine. It is still the clearest signal so far that a European regulator with accessibility powers is willing to use them publicly.

Meanwhile the sharper end of French enforcement has been private: two first-instance rulings in 2026, one ordering Carrefour to make its site and app fully accessible within six months, another dismissing an equivalent claim against Auchan on a revenue-threshold technicality. We covered that split in a separate article.

The US number everyone quotes, in context

According to UsableNet's annual tracking, more than 5,000 digital accessibility lawsuits were filed in the United States in 2025 — roughly 3,100 federal and roughly 1,900 at state level, with New York and California dominating. E-commerce accounted for around 70 % of defendants.

Two honest qualifications. UsableNet sells accessibility services, so this is a vendor dataset rather than an official court statistic, even though it is the de-facto industry reference. And US ADA litigation is a different legal regime from the EAA. It is useful as a trend indicator for how much accessibility litigation a mature market generates, not as a prediction of European penalties.

The overlay finding inside that data is the part with direct European relevance: roughly 120 cases per month were filed against businesses that had an accessibility widget installed, and widgets showed no meaningful reduction in lawsuits. That is consistent with what the US Federal Trade Commission alleged when it required accessiBe to pay $1,000,000 — an order proposed on 3 January 2025 and approved in final form on 22 April 2025 — over claims that its widget could make any website WCAG-compliant.

The deadline nobody is talking about yet

Article 32 of the Directive lets service providers keep using products that were lawfully in use before 28 June 2025 for a transitional period of five years — until 28 June 2030 — unless they replace them sooner. Self-service terminals may continue to the end of their economic life, capped at 20 years.

For an online shop this matters more than it sounds. Replatforming, redesigning, or swapping a checkout provider generally ends the transitional shelter for the thing you replaced. In practice, the next time you rebuild is the point at which the question becomes live, whichever year that falls in.

So what is the real risk in 2026?

Ranked by how likely we think each is to actually reach you, based on what the record currently shows:

None of that requires panic. It does argue for knowing, in writing, what is actually wrong with your site, so that whichever of these arrives first, you are answering it with a remediation record rather than a scramble.

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