EAA Deadline & Penalties: What Businesses Must Do

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) set a hard date that has now passed: 28 June 2025. Since then, many businesses selling to EU consumers have been legally required to make their products and digital services accessible. If you trade into the EU and haven't addressed accessibility yet, you are already past the deadline — this guide explains what that means and what to do about it.

The key date: 28 June 2025

The EAA (Directive (EU) 2019/882) was adopted in 2019, transposed into national law by member states, and became applicable to in-scope products and services on 28 June 2025. Some long-running services and specific product categories have transitional periods, but for most websites and e-commerce, the obligation is live now.

Who is in scope

The EAA covers a defined set of products and services offered to EU consumers. In practice, the digital services most commonly affected include:

E-commerce and online stores
Banking and financial services
E-books and dedicated reading software
Transport and ticketing services
Telecoms and certain audiovisual media services

Microenterprises providing services (very roughly, fewer than 10 staff and under a defined turnover/balance-sheet threshold) may have relief from some obligations — but this varies by member state and by whether you sell products or services. The exact microenterprise thresholds — and which obligations they relieve — differ between national transpositions, so confirm against the law in the member state(s) you sell into rather than assuming an exemption applies. For a practical walkthrough, see our EAA compliance checklist.

What "compliant" means in practice

The EAA relies on harmonised standards that, for the web, track the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The working target is WCAG 2.1 / 2.2 Level AA. Building and testing to AA is the recognised way to show you've taken the standard seriously. If you're unsure where you stand, start by checking — see is my website WCAG 2.2 AA compliant?

How enforcement and penalties work

Here's the important caveat: the EAA is an EU directive, so enforcement and penalties are set and applied at the national level. Each member state designates its own market-surveillance and enforcement authorities and sets its own sanctions, which the directive requires to be "effective, proportionate and dissuasive." That means there is no single EU-wide fine figure.

In general terms, enforcement mechanisms across member states can include:

Complaints from consumers or advocacy bodies to a national authority
Investigations and orders to bring a service into conformity
Financial penalties (amounts and caps are defined per country)
In some cases, restrictions on offering the non-compliant service

A caution on specific figures: some commentary cites particular maximum fines or even imprisonment in certain countries, but these are national specifics that change and vary widely. We deliberately don't quote a euro amount here, because doing so accurately requires checking each member state's transposing legislation. If you need a number for budgeting or risk assessment, get it from the relevant national authority or qualified legal counsel for the specific country.

Beyond fines: the real costs

Penalties aren't the only exposure. Inaccessible sites also risk:

Lost customers — people with disabilities are a large market segment
Reputational damage and public complaints
Rushed, expensive remediation under deadline pressure
Contractual risk if clients require you to be compliant

For many businesses, the customer-experience and contract-risk costs outweigh the headline fine.

What to do now

Because the deadline has passed, the priority is to act, document, and demonstrate good-faith progress:

Confirm your scope and the member states you sell into.
Run a scan to find the obvious failures fast.
Prioritise blocking, high-impact issues and fix them first.
Do the manual checks automation can't (keyboard, screen reader, media).
Keep records of what you tested, fixed, and have outstanding.
Publish an accessibility statement and a way to report problems.

Free scanner (coming soon) with WCAGwise to see where you stand today, then export an EAA-mapped report when you need to evidence the work. WCAGwise is an audit aid, not legal advice or a guarantee of compliance — but it gives you a fast, documented starting point. See the Pro report option for the client-ready PDF.

EAA deadline & penalties: what businesses must do