Guides › EAA penalties and enforcement: what the law says, and what has actually happened

EAA penalties and enforcement: what the law says, and what has actually happened

10 min read Reviewed 2026-08-22

Most pages on this subject lead with the largest number they can find. That is not useful, and some of the numbers being circulated are simply wrong. Here is what the legislation actually says, checked against the primary sources, and what has actually happened so far.

Start here: no EAA fine has been issued yet

As far as can be established at the time of writing, no company has been fined under any national EAA transposition anywhere in the EU. Not one. If you have read that you face €900,000 penalties, that figure is a statutory ceiling written into legislation, not an outcome anyone has experienced.

We are telling you this because you will find out anyway, and a supplier who leads with a number they cannot support has told you something about themselves. But do not mistake it for reassurance, because the enforcement that has happened did not come from a regulator.

What did happen: Carrefour, June 2026

On 4 June 2026 the tribunal judiciaire de Caen ruled against Carrefour France over the accessibility of its e-commerce website and shopping app. The case was brought not by a regulator but by two disability associations — ApiDV and Droit pluriel — supported by a collective of lawyers.

The court ordered Carrefour to:

• make the site and app fully accessible within six months;
• pay €500 per day in penalty payments if it fails to;
• pay €10,000 in damages.

The reasoning matters more than the amounts. The court treated accessibility as an obligation de résultat — an obligation as to outcome, not effort — and held that an e-commerce site "cannot be only a little accessible, it must be totally accessible."

A €500 daily penalty running until you fix the problem is a different kind of exposure from a one-off fine. It compounds while your developers are still scheduling the work, and it does not care how large your business is.

This is the realistic model. Enforcement is arriving through civil litigation brought by well-organised disability organisations, ahead of regulators, and the remedy is an injunction with a compounding penalty rather than a headline fine.

Germany: the warning-letter problem

Germany has a second mechanism that has no equivalent in most member states. Under German unfair competition practice, competitors and law firms can issue an Abmahnung — a formal warning letter demanding a cease-and-desist undertaking and reimbursement of the sender's legal costs.

Reports indicate German e-commerce operators began receiving these citing accessibility grounds within weeks of the BFSG taking effect. The individual sums are small next to a statutory maximum, but they arrive quickly, they arrive in volume, and they do not require a regulator to have opened anything. If you sell into Germany, this is a more probable near-term cost than a fine.

Statutory maximums by country

These are the ceilings written into the legislation. They are what a court or authority may impose at the very top of the range, for the most serious and typically persistent breaches. They are not expected outcomes, and treating them as such would be misleading.

We have checked the first four against the primary legislation and linked it, so you can verify rather than take our word for it. The last two we have not yet confirmed against the statute itself and have labelled accordingly.

If you need a figure you can rely on in a board paper or a risk register, use the four marked "primary source" and follow the link. We will mark the others verified once we have read the statute rather than a summary of it.

What actually triggers enforcement

Ranked by how likely you are to meet it:

1. A customer who could not complete a purchase and told somebody. This is the origin of nearly everything else on this list.
2. A disability organisation running a testing campaign. They are well organised, the evidence is trivially reproducible by anyone with a browser, and as Carrefour demonstrates they now litigate and win.
3. A German Abmahnung, if you sell into Germany.
4. A procurement questionnaire asking for your accessibility statement and conformance claim. No fine attached — you just lose the deal. In practice this is the cost most companies actually incur first.
5. A regulator's own investigation. Real — Sweden is reported to have opened proactive investigations — but the slowest of the five.

Note what sits at the top. Almost every route begins with a real person hitting a real barrier on a real page. That is also the thing you can fix.

The overlay trap

If you are about to solve this by installing an accessibility overlay widget, read this first.

In January 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission acted against accessiBe over claims that its AI-powered accessWidget could make any website WCAG compliant. The FTC found those claims false, misleading or unsubstantiated, and separately alleged the company had presented paid reviews as independent opinion. The final order, approved in April 2025, required a $1 million payment and bars the company from claiming its automated product can make a site WCAG compliant, or keep it compliant, without evidence. FTC press release (opens in a new tab)

Two things follow. An overlay does not remediate the underlying code, so it does not resolve your EAA exposure. And a supplier's compliance promise is not a defence — the obligation stays with you.

Last reviewed 2026-08-22. General information, not legal advice. Penalty provisions are national and change; verify against the current statute before relying on any figure here.