BFSG micro-enterprise exemption: does it cover you?

The BFSG has applied since 28 June 2025 and requires providers of certain products and services to make them usable by people with disabilities. For websites that essentially means: operable by keyboard, readable with assistive technology, sufficient contrast, an understandable structure.

That is the end of the introduction, because this article is about one thing only: the micro-enterprise exemption. It is the point at which most small businesses stop reading — “under ten people, under two million, done”. That shortcut is the problem. The exemption is not a label you attach to yourself, it is the outcome of an assessment. If you are going to rely on it, you should know exactly what you are relying on.

The two size criteria — and why they belong together

The first criterion is headcount: the law draws the line at fewer than ten employees. “Fewer than ten” means nine, not ten. That sounds obvious, but it is already the first place where a number turns into a question — because “employees” is not the same thing as “people on the payroll”.

The second criterion is financial: annual turnover, or alternatively an annual balance sheet total, of no more than two million euros. The law names two figures side by side. You should not read that as an invitation to pick whichever suits you better: which figure applies in your case, and over what period it is looked at, is a question for the tax adviser who knows your accounts.

The decisive point is that the criteria are assessed together, not chosen from. A business with six employees and three million euros of turnover meets one criterion and not the other. The reverse holds too: very small turnover does not make headcount irrelevant. What follows from that in your case is a legal assessment — the arithmetic is only where it starts.

How employees are counted — a question, not an answer

The moment you take the number nine seriously, it breaks apart into individual questions. Almost no small business consists of nine identical full-time roles. The points below are the ones that come up in practice — and they are set out here deliberately as questions, not as answers:

• Part-time staff: does each person count individually, or is it converted into full-time equivalents?
• Working owners and partners: do they count when they actually work in the business?
• Apprentices and trainees: are they included, and does anything change when the training ends?
• Casual staff, working students and seasonal workers who are only there for part of the year
• Freelancers invoicing you who are in practice permanently integrated into the business
• People on parental leave, long-term sick leave or garden leave whose role remains filled
• The reference date: is it today’s position, an annual average, or the last financial year?

Any one of these can push a business that believes itself safely under the threshold above it — and the other way round. A business with seven full-time staff, four part-time staff and two apprentices arrives at seven, at nine, or at thirteen employees depending on the counting method. That is not hair-splitting, it is the difference between two sides of the same threshold. Take this list to your appointment rather than settling it yourself.

Service or product — the distinction most often missed

In the law, the exemption is written for services. It does not apply to products in the same way. That half-sentence is missing from almost every summary, and it is the reason why “we are a micro-enterprise” on its own says nothing definitive about your whole offering.

In practice: a business can be in one position for what it delivers as a service and in another for what it places on the market as a product. A website through which an appointment is booked and a website through which a device is sold are not the same thing under this heading — even when both sit on the same server, are built in the same design, and look identical to the visitor.

If your business does both, delivers services and sells goods, that is the first thing to raise. The answer can come out differently for the two parts of your offering, and a blanket self-assessment does not cover that case. It is not merely imprecise there — it simply does not apply.

The test points at a glance

The overview below does not replace the assessment. It only sorts out which criterion the law uses and which document makes each question answerable when you take it to an adviser. Turning up with the folder already assembled tends to settle the matter in one appointment rather than three.

“We are under it” is a snapshot

The criteria describe a position, not an inherent quality of your business. Companies grow, and the events that carry a business over one of the two thresholds are precisely the ones you celebrate:

• Two hires in the same quarter because the order book allows it
• Taking on two apprentices once they qualify
• A single large contract that lifts one financial year over the turnover threshold
• A merger with a second business, or an acquisition
• A new sales channel — a shop alongside the existing service, for instance

That is why an assessment made once belongs in the calendar as well. Once a year, ideally alongside the annual accounts, the question takes minutes to ask: have the figures moved enough that the assessment needs revisiting? And if so — how long would it take to bring the existing website along? That second question is better asked before than after, because retrofitting under time pressure is the most uncomfortable route there is.

Exempt does not mean the subject is closed

There are two things the exemption does not say, and both get read into it regularly.

First, it says nothing about other requirements. It concerns this one statute. Impressum obligations, data protection and anything arising from your contracts continue independently of it. Your clients can impose requirements too: if you bid for tenders or work for public bodies and larger companies, accessibility can turn up in procurement documents and supplier questionnaires. There it is a contractual condition and not a question of company size.

Second, it says nothing about whether accessibility is worth doing. That is a separate question with a different answer. The measures at the heart of it are largely just solid craft: sufficient contrast, a clean heading structure, operability without a mouse, labelled form fields, alternative text for images. Doing that is not for the benefit of an authority — it is for the customer squinting at a phone in bright sunlight, and incidentally for the search engine reading the same structure.

It is entirely fine to take the topic slowly if an adviser has concluded that no obligation applies. But “not obliged” is a different sentence from “not relevant”, and the two are easily confused.

Settling it properly once is the cheapest route

The effort involved in a proper assessment is modest: one appointment, a few documents, a written opinion you file away. The two alternatives cost more. One is retrofitting an existing website under time pressure — reworking structure, contrast and forms after the fact regularly costs more than the same work as part of a rebuild you were planning anyway. The other is relying for years on a self-assessment nobody ever checked, and then discovering it rested on a counting method that does not hold.

If you want to get it done, in this order:

1. 01Write down what your website actually does: inform, take bookings, commission services, sell goods. Listed separately, not condensed into one sentence.
2. 02Pull a staff overview with contract type, contracted hours and training contracts — as at today and as at the end of the last financial year.
3. 03Add the figures for recent financial years, in whatever form your tax adviser already keeps them.
4. 04Write out your open questions from the list above in advance. Turn up with questions and you get answers; turn up with an assumption and you get a question back.
5. 05Ask for a written, dated opinion and file it with the rest. A verbal answer from three years ago will not help you later.
6. 06Set an annual reminder, tied to the annual accounts.

And if a relaunch is on the cards anyway: that is the point at which the whole subject costs least, regardless of how the legal question comes out. We build websites to these standards because they make a site better for every visitor — not because we could tell you whether you have to. Only your adviser can do that, and it is worth having them do it properly once.

Common questions about the BFSG micro-enterprise exemption