A dedicated digital accessibility budget covers the range of costs involved in a mature accessibility program: periodic audits, remediation development work, staff training and certification, automated testing tools, and any specialized consulting brought in for complex projects or specific compliance deadlines.
Organizations without a defined accessibility budget tend to treat every accessibility fix as an unplanned, competing priority against other feature work, which is a major reason accessibility work often stalls, while organizations that budget for it proactively tend to make steadier, more predictable progress toward and beyond conformance.