EAA Fines by Country: All 27 EU States

EAA Fines by Country: Penalties Across All 27 EU Member States

What the European Accessibility Act's penalties are in each of the 27 EU member states — sourced from each country's own law.

Last updated August 2026 · Every figure checked against the national law it comes from · See our method

The short version

• There's no single EU-wide fine. The European Accessibility Act tells each of the 27 countries to set their own penalties, so the amount depends entirely on which country you're selling into.
• The ceilings range from about €1,500 (France) to €1,000,000 (Luxembourg) — a nearly 700× spread for breaking the same EU rules.
• Several countries set no fixed figure at all (Greece, Denmark, Finland, Malta, and Spain), leaving the amount to a court or regulator.
• A lot of the numbers you'll find online are wrong. The Netherlands is widely quoted at €900,000 — the real accessibility ceiling is €103,000. France is quoted at €50,000 — it's €1,500. We checked every figure against the actual national law.
• Almost no one has been fined yet. The rules only became enforceable on 28 June 2025, so for now these are the penalties on the books, not fines that have been handed out.

On this page

1. What the EAA actually says about fines
2. Three ways countries actually enforce
3. EAA penalties by country: the full comparison
4. The numbers everyone gets wrong
5. Every country, in plain terms
6. The 700× gap: highest vs. lowest
7. Have any EAA fines actually been issued yet?
8. The countries with no fixed fine
9. Why so many published figures are wrong
10. Frequently asked questions

What the EAA actually says about fines

The European Accessibility Act is a directive, not a regulation — and that distinction is the whole reason this page exists. A directive doesn't apply directly. It sets the goal and hands each country the job of writing its own law to reach it, including the penalties. The Act's entire instruction on fines is one short passage, Article 30:

"Member States shall lay down rules on penalties applicable to infringements of the national provisions adopted pursuant to this Directive… The penalties provided for shall be effective, proportionate and dissuasive."

— Article 30, Directive (EU) 2019/882 (EUR-Lex)

That's it. Three words — effective, proportionate and dissuasive — and the actual numbers, the enforcing bodies, and the way fines are calculated were all left to the 27 national governments. Article 30 adds only two things: a fine has to reflect how bad the breach is, and paying it doesn't let you off the hook — you still have to make the product or service accessible.

So when you see "the EAA fine is €X," treat it as a warning sign. There is no EAA fine. There are 27 national penalty regimes, and they look nothing alike.

Three ways countries actually enforce

Once you get past the individual numbers, the 27 regimes fall into three basic types. Knowing which one you're dealing with tells you more about your real exposure than any single figure — because a "small" fine that repeats every day can cost more than a big one-off ceiling.

1. A fixed maximum fine. The most common setup: the law names a top figure. Luxembourg (up to €500,000, doubling to €1,000,000 for repeat offences), Croatia (€132,720) and Ireland (€60,000 plus possible jail time) work this way. The number is a ceiling, not a set price — the actual fine is scaled to the breach — but at least you know the worst case in advance.

2. A recurring "until you fix it" fine. Finland, Sweden and Estonia lean on penalties designed to force a fix rather than punish the past. These often have no real ceiling, because they repeat — daily, or per period — until you comply. A €1,000-a-day penalty is small on paper and enormous if you ignore it for a year.

3. No fixed figure at all. Greece, Denmark, Malta and Spain don't name an amount. A court or regulator sets it case by case, guided only by that "proportionate" principle from Article 30. A missing number isn't a loophole — it means the ceiling is effectively open.

Two countries don't fit any box. Poland ties its fine to a formula (a national wage figure × 10, capped at 10% of turnover), and Italy switches to a turnover-based sanction (up to 5%) for large providers. Both behave like fixed-ceiling systems but produce a different number for every company.

EAA penalties by country: the full comparison

All 27 EU member states, with the headline penalty and enforcement model. In each country's section below you'll find the mechanism explained and a link to the full, sourced breakdown.

Figures are the statutory maximums or mechanisms in each national law. "No fixed figure" means the law sets a discretionary or open-ended penalty rather than a stated ceiling.

The numbers everyone gets wrong

Because you have to read each country's own law — often in its own language, often pointing to a second law — most published "EAA fine" figures are copied from each other and wrong. Here are the four worst offenders, with the actual statute in each case.

🇳🇱 Netherlands — quoted at €900,000. It's €103,000.

This is the one nearly everyone gets wrong. The Dutch EAA law doesn't set a fine itself — it routes enforcement into the Commodities Act (Warenwet). That Act has two different ceilings, and the accessibility one is deliberately the lower of the two:

"The administrative fine… shall not exceed the amount determined for the fifth category"

— Warenwet, Art. 35e(2)

The fifth category of the Criminal Code is €103,000 (2024). The €900,000 everyone quotes is the sixth category — which applies to general product-safety breaches, not accessibility — and it's even out of date (it's now €1,030,000). Two errors in one number. Source: Warenwet.

🇫🇷 France — quoted at €50,000. It's €1,500.

France's EAA penalty runs through the minor-offence (contravention) system, not the big administrative-fine schedule people assume:

"A 5th-class contravention carries a maximum fine of €1,500 (€3,000 for a repeat offence)"

— French Penal Code, Art. 131-13

The €50,000 figure comes from confusing this with the separate public-sector website schedule run by the regulator Arcom. Different track, different law. Source: Légifrance.

🇸🇪 Sweden — quoted as "no fixed fine." It has one.

Sweden is often lumped in with the no-figure countries. Its law actually sets a capped sanction fee:

"The sanction fee shall be set at no less than SEK 10,000 and no more than SEK 10,000,000"

— Lag (2023:254), § 39

That's roughly €900 to €900,000, on top of a separate open-ended "until you comply" penalty (vite). Source: Riksdagen.

🇭🇺 Hungary — the fine isn't in the accessibility law at all.

Hungary's 2022 Accessibility Act tells you, in Section 7, that the real obligations and penalties live in a different law — the 2012 Act on Market Surveillance of Products — which in turn leaves the actual amount to a government decree. Any source quoting a neat Hungarian euro figure hasn't followed the trail. Source: Act XVII of 2022.

Every country, in plain terms

Each entry summarises the mechanism and headline figure; the linked article traces every number to its source in the national law and names the enforcing authority.

Austria — Size-based ceilings: up to €80,000 for large companies, €50,000 for SMEs. Read the full Austria breakdown →

Belgium — Fines from €208 to €80,000, reached by applying statutory multipliers to two sanction bands. Read the full Belgium breakdown →

Bulgaria — Transposed late (2025); penalties are set in tiers in Bulgarian lev under that law. Read the full Bulgaria breakdown →

Croatia — Up to €132,720, with different ceilings for manufacturers, importers and distributors. Read the full Croatia breakdown →

Cyprus — Two tracks side by side: administrative fines up to €20,000, plus a criminal route of up to €30,000 and three years. Read the full Cyprus breakdown →

Czechia — A purely administrative ceiling of CZK 10 million (about €400,000) — no criminal track. Read the full Czechia breakdown →

Denmark — No fixed figure; a court sets the amount. We confirmed the absence of a stated ceiling across multiple checks. Read the full Denmark breakdown →

Estonia — A coercive fine up to €10,000 to force compliance, kept separate from punitive fines. Read the full Estonia breakdown →

Finland — An "until you comply" fine with no ceiling by design — it repeats until you fix the problem. Read the full Finland breakdown →

France — €1,500 (€3,000 for repeat offences) — not the €50,000 widely quoted online. Read the full France breakdown →

Germany — Up to €100,000 for the core breaches, plus a real risk of competitor lawsuits (the Abmahnung system). Read the full Germany breakdown →

Greece — No fixed figure; the law requires only that penalties be proportionate. Read the full Greece breakdown →

Hungary — The penalty isn't in the accessibility act — it's set via the 2012 market-surveillance law and a government decree. Read the full Hungary breakdown →

Ireland — Up to €60,000 plus up to 18 months' imprisonment, with directors personally on the hook. Read the full Ireland breakdown →

Italy — Administrative fines of €5,000–€40,000 (plus €2,500–€30,000 for ignoring the regulator) — but for providers with over €500m turnover, the regulator applies a sanction of up to 5% of turnover. Read the full Italy breakdown →

Latvia — Up to €20,000, set not in the accessibility law but through a cross-referenced conformity-assessment law. Read the full Latvia breakdown →

Lithuania — €500 to €15,000, tightened by amendments that took effect in April 2026. Read the full Lithuania breakdown →

Luxembourg — The EU's highest fixed ceiling: up to €500,000, doubling to €1,000,000 for repeat offences. Read the full Luxembourg breakdown →

Malta — No figure specified; the law defers the amount downstream, so any euro figure attributed to Malta is unsupported. Read the full Malta breakdown →

Netherlands — Up to €103,000 — not the €900,000 you'll see quoted almost everywhere. Read the full Netherlands breakdown →

Poland — No flat maximum: the fine is a formula — the national average wage × 10, capped at 10% of turnover. Read the full Poland breakdown →

Portugal — Tiered administrative fines, and the only country to spell out its "disproportionate burden" criteria in a dedicated order. Read the full Portugal breakdown →

Romania — Ten separate violation categories, each with its own band in Romanian lei. Read the full Romania breakdown →

Slovakia — Two parallel penalty systems running at once — a consumer-protection track and a media track. Read the full Slovakia breakdown →

Slovenia — Ceilings that rise with company size, so bigger companies face higher maximums. Read the full Slovenia breakdown →

Spain — No national figure. Sanctions follow each sector's own rules, with the general disability law (fines up to €1,000,000) as a fallback, enforced by the regions. Read the full Spain breakdown →

Sweden — A capped sanction fee up to about €900,000 (SEK 10m), plus an open-ended "until you comply" penalty. Read the full Sweden breakdown →

The 700× gap: highest vs. lowest

For breaking the exact same EU rules, what you risk depends almost entirely on your postcode.

At the top, Luxembourg stands alone among the fixed ceilings: up to €500,000, doubling to €1,000,000 for a repeat offence. Behind it sit Czechia (~€400,000), Croatia (€132,720) and Germany (€100,000).

At the bottom, France's €1,500 is the lowest fixed figure in the Union — which is exactly why the €50,000 number attached to it online is so misleading.

But the ceilings only tell half the story. Two mechanisms can quietly outrun every figure above:

• Turnover-linked fines. Poland (national wage × 10, capped at 10% of turnover) and Italy (up to 5% of turnover for providers above €500m) scale with company size, so for a large business they can exceed any flat ceiling.
• "Until you comply" fines. Finland's and Sweden's recurring penalties have no practical cap — left unfixed, a modest daily figure compounds past any one-off maximum.

The lesson: don't rank your risk by the headline number alone. A €1,500 ceiling in a country that actively enforces can matter more than a €500,000 ceiling in one that doesn't — which brings us to the question everyone should be asking.

Have any EAA fines actually been issued yet?

Mostly, no — and any page telling you regulators are handing out million-euro fines is inventing it. The rules only became enforceable on 28 June 2025, and across most of the 27 countries the national regulators have been slow off the mark. But "few regulator fines" is not the same as "nothing is happening" — because the first real enforcement has come through the courts and through competitors, not through government fines.

France: the first real ruling (Carrefour). On 4 June 2026, the Tribunal judiciaire de Caen ordered Carrefour to make its website and app fully accessible within six months, or pay €500 per day until it does — under Article L.412-13 of the Consumer Code, France's EAA transposition. The case was brought not by a regulator but by two disability-rights organisations (apiDV and Droit Pluriel). The court's reasoning is the part every business should note: it treated accessibility as "an obligation of result, not of means," and rejected Carrefour's 71%-compliant score as not good enough. A second retailer, Auchan, was found non-compliant in the same wave of actions but avoided an emergency order. (Sources: handicap.fr, Intérêt à Agir.)

Germany: warning letters, but a contested basis. Germany's market-surveillance authorities can impose fines up to €100,000. Separately, there's been talk of a "wave" of competitor and association warning letters (Abmahnungen) for accessibility breaches — but German lawyers are divided on whether these hold up: they only stand if the accessibility rules count as "market-conduct rules" under competition law, and several commentators warn many such letters may not. The letters are real; their legal force is unsettled. (Source: ratgeberrecht.eu.)

What this means for you. The lesson isn't "relax, no one's being fined." It's that the risk has arrived earlier through litigation than through regulators — and that fixing an inaccessible site or product takes months you don't have once a formal notice lands. In the Carrefour case, the NGOs sent their first legal notices on 7 July 2025 — ten days after the law took effect. The window to get compliant is the real deadline, not the first regulator fine.

The countries with no fixed fine

Five countries — Greece, Denmark, Malta, Spain and Finland — don't give you a maximum euro figure. This is the single biggest source of made-up numbers online, because when there's no figure to report, weaker sources invent one. Here's what "no fixed fine" actually means in each case, and it isn't the same thing:

The takeaway runs against intuition: no stated ceiling usually means more uncertainty, not less. An open-ended figure a court sets after the fact is harder to plan around than a known maximum.

Why so many published figures are wrong

Because the EAA hands penalties to national law, checking a figure means reading the actual national statute — and that's where most sources give up. Three traps catch them:

1. The figure is in another language. Most of these laws exist only in Bulgarian, Greek, Finnish, and so on. Secondary sites lift each other's numbers rather than read the source.
2. The figure is in a second law. Hungary's penalties sit in its 2012 market-surveillance act, not its accessibility act. Latvia's are in a conformity-assessment law. The Netherlands' are in the Commodities Act and the Criminal Code. Miss the cross-reference and you get the wrong number — or none.
3. The wrong figure gets attached to the right country. The Netherlands is the clearest case: the widely-quoted €900,000 is a real number from Dutch law — just not the accessibility one.

Every figure on this page was checked against the national law it comes from, and each links to the official source so you can see it yourself. Where a country genuinely has no figure, we say so rather than fill the gap with a guess. (For the full method, see How we verified all 27 national laws.)

Frequently asked questions

Is there a single EU-wide EAA fine?

No. The European Accessibility Act requires each of the 27 member states to set its own penalties. They must be "effective, proportionate and dissuasive," but the amounts and mechanisms differ in every country.

What is the highest EAA fine?

Luxembourg has the highest fixed ceiling: up to €500,000, doubling to €1,000,000 for repeat offences. Turnover-linked regimes in Poland and Italy can go higher for a very large company, because a percentage of turnover has no absolute cap.

Which countries have no fixed EAA fine?

Greece, Denmark, Malta, Spain and Finland don't set a fixed euro maximum — they use discretionary, deferred, or open-ended penalties instead.

Is the French EAA fine really €50,000?

No. France's penalty is €1,500 (€3,000 for a repeat offence). The €50,000 figure online confuses it with a separate public-sector website regime.

Is the Dutch EAA fine really €900,000?

No. The accessibility ceiling in the Netherlands is €103,000. The €900,000 figure comes from a different, general product-safety provision — not the accessibility one.

When did EAA penalties start applying?

The rules became enforceable on 28 June 2025. Few regulator fines have been issued yet, but court cases (such as the Carrefour ruling in France) have already begun.

Get the country detail — and keep this page bookmarked

This page is the hub. Each country above links to a full breakdown with the exact statute, the enforcing authority, and how the fine is calculated. From here you can also go deeper:

• How we verified all 27 national laws — our method, in full.

We update this page whenever a national law changes or a new enforcement action lands. (Last reviewed: August 2026.)