The ADA Title II web deadline moved — here is your actual date

On 20 April 2026 the Department of Justice issued an interim final rule pushing the Title II web accessibility compliance dates back by one year. It was published and took effect the same day, and it is on the record as 91 FR 20902 — the citation to quote if someone asks you to show where the date comes from. The dates now are:

Special district governments sit in the later group regardless of the population they serve. A water, fire or library district takes the 2028 date even where it serves a large county.

What the extension did not do

It moved a date. It did not create an exemption, and it did not suspend anything already in force. Three things are worth being precise about:

• The underlying obligation predates the rule. Title II’s requirement that programs and services be accessible has applied for decades. The web rule sets a technical standard and a date for it; it did not create the duty.
• Private litigation is unaffected. The compliance date governs DOJ’s regulation. It is not a shield against a complaint brought in the meantime.
• DOJ has said it expects to implement at the new date. The extension was framed as assistance with the transition, not as a signal of retreat.

The practical read: the deadline moved, the exposure did not, and the extra year is the amount of time you now have to do the work rather than the amount you can wait.

The standard is WCAG 2.1 Level AA

The rule points at WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and its scope is wider than the pages of the main site. It reaches web pages, mobile apps, online forms, electronic documents — PDFs included — and multimedia.

Documents are where small entities are usually weakest, and it is rarely a design problem. A decade of scanned agendas, minutes and budget PDFs posted as images of text will not pass, and no amount of work on the site templates changes that. Any realistic plan has to count the document backlog as its own piece of work.

Why so many pages still show the old dates

The original rule was published in 2024 with 2026 and 2027 dates, and a great deal of guidance was written against it. The April 2026 extension came late relative to that, so material published before it — including vendor pages and checklists still circulating — carries dates that are now a year off.

It is worth checking the date on anything you are planning against. A page that does not say when it was last reviewed is not one to schedule against.

How to check where a public entity stands today

Knowing the correct date does not tell a public entity whether its own site would pass. The two questions are separate, and the second one is measurable now rather than in 2027. CivicBinder publishes the Municipal Web Accessibility Index — automated WCAG 2.1 AA homepage scans of US local-government sites, run with axe-core against the same rule set the DOJ rule points at, graded A–F, with a page per entity and the whole thing downloadable as open data under CC BY 4.0. It will not substitute for a manual audit, and no automated scanner catches every WCAG 2.1 AA failure. It does answer the narrower question of whether an entity’s homepage has serious or critical defects on it right now, which is the question most councils ask first.

Where CivicBinder fits

CivicBinder audits the site against WCAG 2.1 Level AA and delivers a binder of evidence and remediation instructions written for the templates and documents you actually have — dated and attributable, so the record shows what was tested and when.

Pricing follows the same population split as the deadlines: $299 for entities serving under 50,000 and $499 for districts and entities at 50,000 or more. What Title II compliance actually costs explains why quotes vary so widely, and which two exceptions in the rule decide how much of your document backlog is in scope. If you are still choosing who does the work, how to compare Title II vendors sets out the six shapes of provider and what each one prices on. If your site is run by a govtech platform, who is responsible for Title II compliance quotes the rule text on vendor-posted content and posting tools. Request a free preliminary report to see where the site stands first. Our own accessibility statement is public, as it should be.

Dates verified against ADA.gov on 4 August 2026, and the interim final rule confirmed against the Federal Register the same day: document 2026-07663, 91 FR 20902, published and effective 20 April 2026. Nothing here is legal advice.