Work Rights, Education & Resource Collective Your rights and accommodations at work
Research summary

The Cost and Benefits of Workplace Accommodations

Cost is the worry that stops many people from asking for a change at work. The data is reassuring: most accommodations cost little or nothing, and employers consistently report that the benefits are worth it.

By Editorial Team Published July 12, 2026 Last reviewed July 12, 2026 Next review January 2027

This is a short summary, not the full study. If a detail matters to you, follow the links to the original.

What it found

  • In the Job Accommodation Network's ongoing survey of employers, most accommodations cost nothing at all. In the figures current as of 2025, 61 percent of employers said the change they made cost nothing to put in place.
  • When an accommodation did have a price, it was usually a one-time expense with a median of about 300 dollars. Only about 6 percent involved an ongoing cost, with a median of about 2,400 dollars a year.
  • Employers also reported clear benefits from accommodating a worker: keeping a valued employee (about 85 percent), higher productivity (about 52 percent), and avoiding the cost of hiring and training a replacement (about 48 percent).
  • An earlier survey of roughly 2,000 workers, presented at a rehabilitation-engineering conference in 2011, pointed the same way. Many workers reported little or no personal cost for their accommodation, and both employees and their supervisors estimated significant gains in productivity, attendance, morale, and staying with the employer.

Why it matters

Under the ADA, an employer weighs the cost of a change against its own resources, not against a fixed price tag, and can only refuse on cost grounds if the change would be an undue hardship, meaning significant difficulty or expense. Knowing that the typical accommodation is inexpensive, and that employers themselves report a payoff, can make the request feel far less daunting.

Worth keeping in mind

  • The 2011 conference figures were described by the researchers as preliminary, and the sample, though large, was not designed to represent every workplace.
  • Averages do not decide your case. Whether a specific change is required depends on your job, your employer's resources, and the back-and-forth of the interactive process.

Sources

Every point above is drawn from these sources: the original study and current official guidance. Links open in a new tab.

  1. Workplace Accommodations: Low Cost, High Impact (opens in a new tab) Job Accommodation Network (JAN)
  2. Enforcement Guidance on Reasonable Accommodation and Undue Hardship Under the ADA (opens in a new tab) U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
  3. Job Accommodation Network (JAN) (opens in a new tab) U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Disability Employment Policy
  4. Effective RT/AT Service Delivery: State of Practice, Quality Indicators, and ROI in the Workplace (RESNA 2011 conference presentation) (opens in a new tab) Scherer, Adya, Samant, and Killeen; Burton Blatt Institute, Syracuse University Preliminary 2011 survey findings; the current figures on this page come from the Job Accommodation Network data cited above.