An accessibility consultant is bought for the half of the work no tool can do: deciding whether a component is usable, not whether an attribute is present. That is worth paying for, and it is easy to waste by handing over a site nobody has scanned, so the consultant spends the first three days finding what a free scanner would have found in an hour. This page is how to brief one, what the rates imply, and what to keep in-house. On the worked example an auditor at $150 an hour spends 11 hours testing and 12 writing, which is $3,480.
Clear the machine-findable failures first
Run a scanner over your templates and fix what it finds before the consultant starts. On the worked example the automated third is the cheapest part of 401 issues, and paying $150 an hour for somebody to list missing alt attributes is the most common way this budget is wasted.
Brief on scope, not on outcome
Name the templates, the interaction types and the assets in scope, and ask for findings against criteria with reproduction steps. Asking a consultant to make us compliant is asking for an outcome nobody can certify; asking for an audit of a named scope with a retest is a piece of work with an end.
Decide what stays in-house
Remediation usually should. Your developers know the codebase, and 126 of the worked example's issues live in nine templates they already own. Buy judgement, evidence and the retest; keep the fixing, unless the site is on a platform nobody inside can change.
Questions people ask about accessibility consultant
What does a WCAG consultant cost?
Rates vary widely; what matters is hours against scope. Put the sample size and the write-up hours into the sheet and the quote becomes comparable.
Independent auditor or the agency that built the site?
Independent, if the audit will be shown to anybody. The agency that built it has an interest in the finding.
Do we need them ongoing?
Usually not. An annual audit plus a scanner in the build catches most regressions at a fraction of a retainer.