A common and expensive misconception is that the Americans with Disabilities Act only applies to new construction, so older buildings are exempt. They are not. Under ADA Title III, a place of public accommodation has an ongoing obligation to remove architectural barriers in existing buildings wherever doing so is "readily achievable," meaning without much difficulty or expense. The standard is lower than for new construction, but the duty is real, continuing, and enforced through private lawsuits as much as government action. And for leased space, both the landlord and the tenant are on the hook.

There is a belief that turns up again and again among building owners, and it is wrong in a way that costs real money: the idea that if your building went up before the ADA, or before you renovated, the accessibility rules simply do not reach it. It is easy to see why people think this. New construction has strict, detailed accessibility standards, and retrofitting an old building is expensive, so it feels reasonable to assume the law grandfathered older properties in. It did not. The ADA draws a distinction between new construction and existing buildings, yes, but that distinction is about how much you have to do, not whether the law applies at all. An existing commercial building open to the public carries its own accessibility obligation, and that obligation never expires. This piece walks through what the law actually requires of existing buildings, what "readily achievable" means and how you judge it, why the duty keeps going year after year, who is liable when space is leased, and how a property owner should approach it in practice. One note first: the ADA is a federal civil-rights statute with real legal consequences, so this is a general explanation rather than legal advice, and any specific building or situation is a question for qualified counsel.

The Misconception, and What the Law Actually Says

Here is the distinction the misconception gets wrong. The ADA sets up different rules for different situations, and there are essentially three. New construction, buildings first occupied after the ADA's new-construction date, must be fully accessible to the current design standards. Alterations, when you renovate, the altered areas have to be brought up to current standards. And then there is the category almost every existing building falls into: the ongoing duty to remove barriers in facilities that already exist.

That third duty is the one people forget, and it is spelled out plainly in the Department of Justice's ADA Title III guidance. Public accommodations, businesses and non-profits open to the public, must remove architectural barriers in existing facilities when it is "readily achievable" to do so. The key phrase is "existing facilities." The obligation does not wait for you to renovate, and it does not care how old the building is. If your building serves the public and has barriers that are readily achievable to remove, the law expects you to remove them, whether the building is two years old or eighty.

What makes this bite is that "public accommodation" is broad. The DOJ's manual lists twelve categories, and they cover most commercial property that the public enters: retail and shopping centers, restaurants and bars, offices of professionals like doctors and lawyers, banks, hotels, gyms, theaters, and more. If members of the public come into your building to buy something, get a service, or be served, it is almost certainly a place of public accommodation, and the barrier-removal duty applies to it now, not someday.

What "Readily Achievable" Actually Means

The whole obligation turns on two words, "readily achievable," so it is worth being precise about them, because they are also where owners have the most room to make sensible decisions.

The DOJ defines readily achievable as easily accomplishable and able to be carried out without much difficulty or expense. That is deliberately a lower bar than the standard for new construction. The logic, as the manual explains, is that in a new building accessibility can be designed in cheaply from the start, while retrofitting an existing building can be genuinely expensive, so the law asks less of existing facilities. You are not required to gut and rebuild an old building to make it perfectly accessible. You are required to do the things that are reasonably doable without major difficulty or cost.

But "not much difficulty or expense" is relative, and this is the part owners need to understand: it is judged against your resources, not in the abstract. Whether removing a given barrier is readily achievable is a case-by-case determination, and the factors include the nature and cost of the work and the overall financial resources of the site, and, critically, of any parent company behind it. The same barrier might be readily achievable for a large, well-resourced owner and not readily achievable for a small one. A national chain and a single-location independent are held to the same standard but will reach different answers on the same barrier, because the standard explicitly bends to what the business can bear.

To make it concrete, the DOJ's regulation lists examples of the kinds of modifications that are often readily achievable, and they are mostly modest: installing a ramp, adding curb cuts, widening a doorway, rearranging furniture or display racks, lowering a paper towel dispenser, installing grab bars in a restroom, repositioning a telephone, creating an accessible parking space by restriping. These are not renovations. They are the small, cheap fixes that, precisely because they are cheap and easy, are hard to argue are not readily achievable. The expensive, structural things, adding an elevator to reach an upper floor, say, are generally not required if they would take extensive restructuring or burdensome expense. The law is targeting the low-hanging fruit, and it expects you to pick it.

The Duty Never Ends

Here is a feature of the obligation that surprises people and matters enormously for how you manage it: readily achievable barrier removal is a continuing duty. It is not a one-time project you complete and file away.

The DOJ is explicit that the obligation is ongoing, and that a barrier whose removal was not readily achievable at one point may become required later as circumstances change. Think about what that means in practice. Maybe removing a particular barrier was too expensive for your business three years ago, and legitimately not readily achievable then. But your business has grown, or you are already doing a renovation nearby, or the cost of the fix has dropped. Now it may be readily achievable, and the duty attaches. The obligation tracks your changing circumstances, which means it is something to revisit periodically, not a box you tick once.

This is why the DOJ recommends, though does not require, that public accommodations conduct a self-evaluation of their facilities to identify barriers and develop an implementation plan to remove them over time. That recommendation is doing real work, because a documented plan matters for reasons beyond good intentions. A serious, diligently executed plan to address barriers as they become readily achievable can serve as evidence of a good-faith effort to comply, which is exactly what you want on record if you are ever challenged. The continuing nature of the duty and the value of a documented plan are two sides of the same coin: because the obligation keeps evolving, the smart posture is an ongoing, recorded process rather than a one-off scramble.

When Space Is Leased, Everyone Is Liable

For any owner who leases space to tenants, or any tenant who leases, there is a point here that is easy to get wrong and costly to get wrong: under Title III, both the landlord and the tenant are responsible.

The DOJ manual is direct about it. Both the landlord and the tenant are public accommodations, and both have full responsibility for complying with Title III for that space. The lease can allocate responsibility between them, you can write into the lease that the tenant handles barrier removal inside the store, or that the landlord handles the common areas, and that allocation is binding between the two parties. But, and this is the crucial part, it does not affect liability to the outside world. As the manual puts it, an allocation in a lease is only effective as between the parties, and both landlord and tenant remain fully liable under the ADA. A customer who encounters a barrier can sue either one, or both, regardless of what the lease says.

So the lease clause that assigns ADA responsibility to your tenant is worth having, it lets you recover from the tenant through indemnification if you are the one sued, but it does not make you safe. You can still be named, still have to defend, still be liable to the plaintiff. For a landlord, that means ADA compliance in leased buildings is not something you can fully contract away; you retain an exposure you have to manage, especially in the common areas, entrances, parking, and paths of travel that you typically control directly. For a tenant, it means you cannot assume the landlord's building is compliant and that you are covered; your space is your exposure.

How a Property Owner Should Actually Approach This

Pulling it together, the practical posture for a property owner is not panic and it is not indifference. It is a managed, documented, ongoing process, and it looks like a few concrete things.

Start by knowing your buildings. You cannot remove barriers you have not identified, so the foundational step is a survey of each property against the accessibility standards, ideally by someone who knows what to look for, to produce a list of the barriers and a sense of which are cheap and easy to fix. The cheap-and-easy ones are, almost by definition, the readily achievable ones you are most exposed on.

Then prioritise, the way the DOJ's own guidance suggests. Its recommended order of priority is intuitive: first, getting people through the door, access from parking and the sidewalk into the building; then access to the areas where goods and services are actually provided; then restrooms; then everything else. That priority order is not mandatory, but it is sensible, and following it concentrates your spending where it does the most good and where complaints are most likely to originate.

Then treat it as ongoing. Because the duty continues and circumstances change, the barriers you could not justify removing this year get revisited next year, especially when you are already renovating, since alterations trigger their own stricter requirements and are the natural moment to address nearby barriers efficiently. And throughout, document, the survey, the plan, the fixes made, the reasoning on what was deferred as not yet readily achievable. That record is both how you manage the work across a portfolio and how you demonstrate good faith if you are ever challenged.

This is where the obligation becomes a property-management discipline rather than a legal abstraction. Across a portfolio, the surveys, the barrier lists, the priority plans, the record of what was fixed and when, and the deferred items waiting for circumstances to change are all property-level data that has to live somewhere durable and get revisited on a schedule. A property management function that tracks each building's accessibility surveys, remediation plans, and completed work alongside its other compliance records, RIOO among the systems that hold them, is positioned to treat barrier removal as the continuing, documented process the law actually contemplates, rather than reconstructing it under the pressure of a lawsuit. The duty is ongoing by design; managing it well means having the record ongoing too.

Conclusion

The belief that an old building is an ADA-exempt building is one of the more expensive misreadings in commercial real estate, because it feels plausible and it is wrong. Existing buildings open to the public carry a real, continuing duty to remove the barriers that are readily achievable to remove, judged against the owner's own resources, and the duty does not end, it evolves as circumstances change. The fixes the law most clearly expects are the modest ones, a ramp, a widened door, an accessible parking space, grab bars, precisely because they are cheap and easy, and precisely because being cheap and easy is what makes them readily achievable.

For an owner, and for a tenant, the smart response is neither to ignore the obligation nor to over-panic about the elevator you may never be required to install. It is to know your buildings, fix the readily achievable barriers in a sensible order, keep doing it as circumstances change, and write down what you did and why. That approach handles the legal exposure, which for leased space you share with the other party no matter what the lease says, and it does the thing the law was actually written to do: make the building usable by everyone who comes to the door.

FAQs

1. Does the ADA apply to older buildings, or only new construction?
It applies to both. New construction and renovations must meet current accessibility standards, but existing buildings open to the public carry a separate, ongoing obligation to remove architectural barriers where doing so is "readily achievable." There is no exemption for buildings that predate the ADA. The difference is that the standard for existing facilities is lower than for new construction, not that older buildings are exempt.

2. What does "readily achievable" mean under the ADA?
The Department of Justice defines it as "easily accomplishable and able to be carried out without much difficulty or expense." It is a deliberately lower bar than new-construction standards, reflecting that retrofitting existing buildings can be costly. Whether removing a specific barrier is readily achievable is judged case by case, considering the cost of the work and the financial resources of the business and any parent company, so the same barrier may be readily achievable for a large owner and not for a small one.

3. What are examples of readily achievable barrier removal?
The DOJ's regulation lists modest, low-cost modifications such as installing ramps, adding curb cuts, widening doorways, rearranging furniture and display racks, installing grab bars in restrooms, lowering dispensers, repositioning telephones, and creating accessible parking spaces by restriping. Expensive structural changes, like adding an elevator to reach an upper floor, are generally not required if they would involve extensive restructuring or burdensome expense. The law targets the inexpensive, easily accomplished fixes.

4. Who is responsible for ADA compliance in a leased space, the landlord or the tenant?
Both. Under ADA Title III, the landlord and the tenant are each fully responsible for compliance in the leased place of public accommodation. A lease can allocate responsibility between them, and that allocation binds the two parties, but it does not limit either one's liability to the public. A customer who encounters a barrier can sue the landlord, the tenant, or both, regardless of what the lease says, so neither party can fully contract the obligation away.

5. Is ADA barrier removal a one-time requirement?
No. It is a continuing obligation. A barrier whose removal was not readily achievable at one point may become required later as circumstances change, for example as the business's resources grow or the cost of the fix falls. Because of this, the Department of Justice recommends conducting a self-evaluation and maintaining an ongoing implementation plan, which also serves as evidence of a good-faith effort to comply if the business is ever challenged.