Federal ADA lawsuits are running at about 440 a month in 2026

Ask how many ADA lawsuits are being filed and you will find plenty of numbers, most of them hard to check. Here is ours, and you can re-run every one of them: in the four months of 2026 with substantially complete court records, February through May, US federal district courts averaged just under 440 non-employment ADA filings a month.

This is the first recap of our federal ADA lawsuit tracker, which we update weekly from public court records. Every count below links to the search that produces it.

The 2026 numbers so far

The tracker counts civil cases filed in US federal district courts under nature-of-suit code 446, "Americans with Disabilities, Other", the code covering non-employment ADA suits. The data comes from the CourtListener/RECAP archive of federal court records, run by the non-profit Free Law Project. As of our August 2, 2026 refresh:

• February 2026: 451 filings (query)
• March 2026: 437 filings (query)
• April 2026: 493 filings (query), the busiest month on our board so far
• May 2026: 378 filings (query)
• June 2026: at least 185 filings (query), records still arriving
• July 2026: at least 231 filings (query), records still arriving

That is 2,175 filings since February 1, and the true total is higher. Court records reach the public archive with a delay, so recent months keep rising for weeks after they end: June and July are floors, not totals, and June currently reading lower than May tells you nothing yet about a real decline. The four complete months add up to 1,759 filings, an average of just under 440 a month. Hold that pace for a year and you get more than 5,000 federal non-employment ADA filings; that is arithmetic, not a forecast.

If you click a query and see a bigger number than we printed, that is the archive catching up since our refresh. The drift only ever runs one way.

Where the filings land

Here is the district split for May 2026, the most recent month with substantially complete records. The listed districts are the ones we query individually, not a verified ranking; everything else is the remainder.

• C.D. California: 91 (query)
• S.D. Florida: 87 (query)
• S.D. New York: 62 (query)
• N.D. Illinois: 40 (query)
• M.D. Florida: 18 (query)
• E.D. New York: 7 (query)
• E.D. Pennsylvania: 2 (query)
• All other districts: 71 (the national total minus the districts above)

The three busiest districts we track, C.D. California, S.D. Florida and S.D. New York, together account for 240 of May's 378 filings, roughly 63%. If you sell nationwide online, the district a suit lands in is the plaintiff's choice, not yours; concentration in a few districts does not mean exposure is concentrated there.

What this counts, and what it doesn't

Precision matters more than a big number, so the honest limits, the same ones stated on the tracker itself:

• Nature-of-suit code 446 covers both website-accessibility suits and physical-premises suits. The code does not distinguish between them, and we don't guess at a split.
• These are federal filings only. State-court cases, a meaningful and growing share of website accessibility litigation, are not in these counts.
• A filing is an allegation. We name no parties, and none of this asserts wrongdoing by anyone.

How this sits next to the numbers you usually see

The figures most often quoted in this space come from firms that track website accessibility suits specifically. EcomBack's 2025 annual report counted 3,948 website accessibility lawsuits in 2025, a count that includes state-court filings, notably in New York, alongside federal ones. UsableNet tracks the same territory with its own methodology and totals.

Our number is a different cut: broader in subject, because code 446 sweeps in physical-premises suits alongside website suits, and narrower in venue, because it counts federal court only. None of these is "the" number, and they are not interchangeable; quote each with its own scope attached. The reason we publish ours is simple: anyone can click the query and re-run it.

The part you can act on

Filing statistics tell you the weather, not whether your own roof leaks. If you sell online and want to know what an automated scan finds on your store, our free scanner runs axe-core, the same open-source engine widely used in accessibility audits, against any public URL. It catches roughly 57% of WCAG issues, a baseline, not a verdict. The free ADA compliance checker page explains what it checks and what it deliberately does not.

The tracker refreshes weekly. We will publish the next recap once the third quarter's records are substantially complete.

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This post reports counts of public federal court filings. A lawsuit filing is an allegation only; we assert no wrongdoing by any party, and nothing here is legal advice.

Sources: Federal ADA lawsuit tracker (methodology + weekly refresh) · CourtListener/RECAP queries linked beside every count · EcomBack 2025 annual report · UsableNet lawsuit tracking