BFSG fines explained: what German accessibility non-compliance actually costs

If you've researched German accessibility penalties, you've probably seen a big round number — often €250,000 — quoted as the fine for an inaccessible website. It's worth knowing where that figure comes from: nowhere. It isn't in the law. It's a scare number that spreads because fear sells audits and overlay widgets.

The real ceiling is lower, more specific, and more useful to understand. Here's what Germany's Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz (BFSG) actually says.

What the BFSG is

The BFSG is Germany's national transposition of the European Accessibility Act (Directive (EU) 2019/882). It came into force on 28 June 2025, and for the first time it obliges private businesses — not just public bodies — to make a defined set of digital products and services accessible to people with disabilities.

So the obligation is real and current. The question is what happens if you don't meet it.

The real numbers: §37 BFSG

Penalties live in §37 BFSG, and they come in two tiers:

• Up to €10,000 for most violations.
• Up to €100,000 for a specific set of serious violations enumerated in the statute (for example, certain manufacturer-side duties and labelling failures).

That's the whole range. There is no €250,000 tier, no per-page multiplier, and no per-user stacking. The amounts are maximums set at the discretion of the market surveillance authority, weighed against the severity of the breach and how the business responds — not automatic charges.

And here's the part the fine-focused headlines miss: money is not the authority's only lever. It can also order a non-compliant service to stop or have a non-compliant product withdrawn from the market. For most digital businesses, losing the ability to operate is the sharper risk than the headline fine.

Who actually enforces it (this is new)

For a long time it wasn't even clear which body would enforce the BFSG. That's now settled. Under §20 BFSG, enforcement falls to the federal states, and the states agreed by treaty to centralise it into a single authority: the Marktüberwachungsstelle der Länder für die Barrierefreiheit von Produkten und Dienstleistungen (MLBF), a public-law institution based in Magdeburg.

The MLBF only took up full operation on 26 September 2025, starting with roughly 70 staff. It works in two modes: a formal check of your documentation and accessibility statement, and a material check of whether your site or app is actually usable. It acts both on its own spot-checks and on complaints from the public.

The honest read on this: enforcement is young. The authority is barely a year into operating, and there's no public record yet of headline fines being handed down. But "no fines yet" is not "no risk" — it's an early clock, with checks explicitly ramping up. The businesses that wait for the first big public fine before acting are the ones who'll be doing remediation under deadline pressure instead of on their own terms.

The microenterprise rule everyone half-remembers

There's a genuine exemption, and it's narrower than people hope. A microenterprise — fewer than 10 employees and annual turnover or balance-sheet total of no more than €2 million — is exempt from the BFSG's obligations for services.

But that exemption does not extend to products. If a small business places a covered product on the market, the BFSG still applies. So "we're a small team, so we're exempt" is only half true, and the status has to be substantiated, not just assumed.

How a fine actually happens

A fine is the end of a process, not the start of it. In practice: a complaint or spot-check flags an issue, the authority reviews it, and you're given a window to correct it. Escalation — fines, stop-orders, market withdrawal — follows only if you don't fix the problem in time.

That correction window is the single most important thing to understand about enforcement, and it's why panic-buying an overlay the week a notice arrives is the wrong move. We unpack exactly how it works in the EAA cure window.

What to do today

You can't manage a risk you haven't measured. The fastest honest first step is to find out what an automated scan can already see on your most important page — it takes under a minute and costs nothing: run a free audit.

For the wider EU picture beyond Germany, see EU Accessibility Act fines by country. And if you're getting your documentation in order, the accessibility statement is where many of these checks begin.

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This article is general information, not legal advice. Figures are drawn from the text of the BFSG and current public sources and are subject to change as enforcement matures. Confirm your obligations with qualified counsel for your specific situation.