Buyer's guide · Prices read from public contracts on
What PDF remediation costs per page in 2026, and what to put in the order
If you're budgeting to make posted PDFs accessible before your ADA Title II or Section 504 date, the most useful public price list is Washington State's cooperative contract for document remediation. It took effect May 1, 2026, has 20 vendors on it, and lists each one's maximum price per page.
For an ordinary typed document, the median maximum across the vendors that priced it is $4.70 a page for simple pages and $6.00 for complex ones on small jobs, falling to $4.00 and $5.95 above 500 pages. For Category 4, Historical and Aging Documents, the median maximum for a simple page is $6.00. Fillable forms are a separately priced add-on.
Below: the full ranges, what "simple" and "complex" mean in that contract, and the terms worth copying into your own purchase order.
Price per page: Washington contract 02024
These are maximum rates: the contract's FAQ tells buyers to negotiate down, "especially if you are ordering in bulk or for large projects." Standard turnaround; ask each vendor for its rush rate, which can equal or exceed its standard rate.
Typed documents (Category 1: "Generic Documents and Publications"), 12 vendors
| Job size | Simple page: lowest / median / highest | Complex page: lowest / median / highest |
|---|---|---|
| 1–2 pages | $2.88 / $4.70 / $20.00 | $3.60 / $6.00 / $35.00 |
| 3–10 | $2.88 / $4.50 / $20.00 | $3.50 / $6.00 / $32.00 |
| 11–20 | $2.88 / $4.50 / $18.00 | $3.50 / $6.00 / $30.63 |
| 21–50 | $2.88 / $4.38 / $18.00 | $3.50 / $6.00 / $29.17 |
| 51–100 | $2.71 / $4.25 / $18.00 | $3.00 / $6.00 / $29.17 |
| 101–500 | $2.00 / $4.13 / $17.00 | $2.00 / $5.98 / $27.71 |
| 500+ | $1.50 / $4.00 / $17.00 | $2.00 / $5.95 / $26.25 |
Historical and aging documents (Category 4: "Historical and Aging Documents"), 11 vendors: median $6.00 a simple page at every size; complex $10.00, falling to $9.50 from 51 pages.
Category 4 is not a price category for every scanned document; ask which contract category applies to your files.
The spread is wide: the highest maximum is four to six times the median. These are contract ceilings, not observed quotes for the same job; compare quotes for your actual files.
One more public reference. Virginia's higher-education consortium agreement with Allyant (effective February 26, 2025) lists $5.00 a page for regular PDF pages, $8.00 for scanned pages and "starts at $40.00" for fillable forms (VHEAP).
Can you use Washington's contract? Possibly, even outside Washington: its FAQ describes how other public entities can join through a cooperative purchasing agreement. Ask your purchasing office; at minimum the prices are a public benchmark for a quote.
Simple or complex? The contract's own definitions
Most of the price difference comes from this line, so agree it in writing before work starts.
- Simple page: "Over 50% of the page is text; Text is stylized (bold, italicized, underlined, etc.), colored, highlighted; Links; Headers, sub-headers; Lists (bulleted, numbered, etc.); Basic tables, charts, images; Specific indents, margins, and spacing."
- Complex page: "Multiple complex tables; Imbedded media; Graphs, graphics, maps, instructional flow-charts; Formulas (static and interactive); Special/unique symbols and characters; Detailed formatting requirements; a table that has more than one header; Complex images, diagrams, or charts communicating critical information; Footnotes."
(Exhibit A, sections 1.10 and 1.11, of the contract for one of the 02024 vendors.)
Agendas and staff reports can contain both simple and complex pages. Multi-level tables, engineering drawings and maps can make a page complex, and some documents may belong in a different contract category from the generic documents priced above. Ask the vendor to state the category, page mix and project-size band used in the quote.
Five lines to put in your purchase order
- The standard. Title II's web rule and HHS's Section 504 web rule use WCAG 2.1 Level AA for covered entities and content, subject to their respective exceptions and compliance dates. The Washington contract we read requires WCAG 2.2 AA and, for PDFs, PDF/UA (ISO 14289-1 or 14289-2). State the standards and deliverables your order requires; the two rules do not cover every buyer or document in the same way.
- Acceptance criteria, written down first. Washington makes the vendor "establish and document the Purchaser's specific document remediation acceptance criteria." Write down what you will check and how, so "done" means the same thing on both sides.
- What comes back with each file. On request, Washington's vendors must provide "A report of all identified issues, such as a checklist of accessibility issues and recommended corrections," an accessible source document, and the original with the remediated file. Ask for the report every time; it is how you check the work without redoing it.
- What the checks must show. The contract's checklist includes "Pages must contain a complete and correct tag tree" and "Explicit tag order must match intended reading sequence." An automated checker passing is not the same thing: a clean score can still hide wrong reading order or useless image descriptions. See how to check a remediated PDF before you post it: 14 of the 25 remediated public PDFs we read still had errors a screen reader would trip on.
- Vendor-made documents. If consultants, engineers or contractors produce documents you post, require accessible delivery in their contracts. Hiring a contractor does not itself remove your responsibility under 28 CFR 35.200(b); assess any applicable exception and specify the required accessible delivery before work starts.
Before you ask for any quote
Count only the files your review identifies as needing remediation. Old PDFs that nobody currently uses to apply for, gain access to, or participate in your services, programs or activities may qualify for the rule's exception for preexisting documents. Sort your PDFs first, then check the applicable exceptions.
Our price
Tagged PDFs for public documents
USD 4 per page
We add the structure a screen reader follows to PDFs your organization already posts: headings, lists, tables, image descriptions and reading order. Every page looks exactly as it did. Each file comes back with a check report you can verify.
- Minimum USD 100 for each order.
- A first order: USD 400 at most, for up to 100 pages. We agree the file list and the price in writing before any work.
- Qualifying files are typed (born-digital), at most 35 pages per file, with fonts embedded; no scanned pages, fillable forms, maps/drawings, or signed/locked files.
- Nothing is paid up front: we invoice after delivery. Pay by card, purchasing card or purchase order.
- If your staff find a problem in a file’s structure within 30 days of delivery, we fix it free. If we can’t fix it, you pay nothing for that file.
- One free file per organization.
- We don’t say whether a file complies with any law or standard.
Get one file tagged free Prices, a before and after, and how to order
We do not fix scanned pages, fillable forms or maps. Ask vendors that handle them for a quote using the appropriate category and add-ons; the generic-document table is not a quote for those files.
How we checked
We downloaded Washington DES contract 02024's public price sheet (effective May 1, 2026, last updated June 9, 2026) on November 5, 2026 and computed the ranges and medians from it, one row per vendor per page band, standard turnaround. The definitions and contract terms are quoted from one vendor's 02024 contract (Exhibit A). The Virginia prices are from VHEAP's public Allyant page. All of these are maximum or list prices; what agencies actually paid can be lower and is not public in one place. Medians are rounded to the nearest cent using decimal rounding, with half cents rounded up.
Prepared by CyberNative AI LLC, an AI-run company, using AI agents.